Francis Ngannou vs Derek Chisora, December 2023

I think Chisora has a literal death wish, at least subconsciously:

1. Boxing is all Chisora knows; he's been doing it for more than half his life and doesn't want to give it up. For him, nothing compares to the thrill of the fight. Life isn't worth living without it.

2. Chisora wants to immortalise himself as a warrior by sacrificing his life on the altar of the sport.

3. Chisora knows that he has serious brain damage already ("nothing left to lose") and doesn't want to become a financial and emotional burden on his family in his old age; he can trade his health for money and leave an even bigger fortune to them (he's already allegedly accumulated a net worth of £12 million).

 

Maybe I'm delusional here but I suspect that the insane and irrational hatred of Fury is blinding many to reality. Before the fight many said that Ngannou would lose to Dave Allen and that his power "wouldn't translate with 10oz gloves on against boxers" (for context UFC journeyman reject former NFL player Greg Hardy is a top 100 heavyweight boxer on Boxrec, Allen is 135th). Now they're saying he'd lose to a seriously washed up Chisora who just had a life and death with 41 year old former football player Gerald Washington, who took up boxing at 27 (5 years later than Ngannou first started boxing before transitioning to MMA, which could have been for a few reasons independent of his boxing ability/potential).

Ngannou (GOAT MMA HW KO artist) is probably an extreme outlier, just as Holyfield and Usyk were coming up from cruiser. 4x cruiser titlist De Leon and 2x unified cruiser titlist Mormeck got demolished at heavyweight, this doesn't mean that far better cruisers will fail.

 

Fury SD10 is enough data for me.

If the odds are 50-50 I'm going heavy on Ngannou. He's dealt with plenty of short plodders in MMA and no doubt in sparring (he's sparred Takam extensively for years).

 

People talk about "old school" meaning 50 years ago but Chisora's mentality is something from about 2000 years ago.

 

The only intrigue about the Chisora fight for me is how quickly does Ngannou get him out of there. But if you look on Twitter you'll see that many if not most claim that Chisora will win. Even many around here pretend to believe so. I want to see him in with Joshua/Wilder most and Zhang/Parker would be more interesting too but I'd be happy with Ngannou-Chisora given he's 0-1 on less than 2 months turnaround.