Quote Originally Posted by Lyle View Post
Quote Originally Posted by LBSCFC View Post
the point is that Klitschko was approaching him prime when he fought Lewis in 2003 and Lewis was past his prime. A prime Lewis would have been much sharper and probably would have busted up Klitschko the same way or at least outboxed him
....he also approached him on Lewis' farewell fight so you could see how Lennox perhaps took preparing for Kirk Johnson a bit more serious than he was given credit for.

It's a tricky fight to discuss for various reasons, it was a short notice fight for both fighters, there was a bad cut that was a freak accident, and that cut ended the fight and nothing else.

Sure there were more cuts but can we say for certain that if the big cut over the eye didn't happen that any of the other cuts would have happened?
Well no we can't say anything would have happened had another thing not, there are all kinds of reasoning for this such as Lewis seeing blood and then targeting Vitalis face more frequently and gaining more confidence which he may not have otherwise, but they are only ifs and maybes. All we can go on is what happened for sure and that was that Lewis cut Vitali quite badly and that won him the fight in a very even contest IMO. Had it gone on without the cuts happening I would have gone for Lewis to win on points eventually taking over, but then again Vitali must have been losing strength and energy with the blood he was losing from the facial wounds.

All in all though the thread was aimed at prime vs prime and IMO Lewis was a way past his prime whereas Vitali was pretty much peaking when they did fight so my conclusion has to be that a prime Lewis without any of the mistakes he could be prone to (see McCall I and Rahman I) would beat a prime Klitschko.