HEAVYWEIGHT boxing has always been the most unpredictable of sports.

Just when you think there’s an ironclad and irreversible hierarchy in place, along comes a curveball in the shape of one fighter in one fight to change the landscape entirely.

Only six months ago, the buzz around an upcoming fight for undisputed between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury was at fever pitch.

Now look where we are. A successful court action brought by Deontay Wilder ended in AJ v Fury being sidelined, with AJ instead compelled to face his WBO mandatory, Oleksandr Usyk, in his next fight and Fury compelled to face Wilder for the third time running in his.

“A cloud no bigger than a man’s hand” goes the biblical injunction, and that cloud appeared in the shape of the aforementioned Usyk last weekend at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London.

A relatively peripheral figure in the heavyweight division hitherto, who in his previous two fights at the weight had looked far from devastating, the former undisputed cruiserweight champion didn’t just beat Joshua, he beat him up to become unified heavyweight world champion in only three fights and leave in tatters the prospect of the $200 million AJ v Fury fight everyone had been anticipating.

Deontay Wilder will now enter the ring at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas this weekend knowing that if he pulls off what hardly anyone apart from him and his team thinks he can, British dominance of a division that has been tantamount to heresy for purists of the sport living on the wrong side of the Atlantic will be ended.

Wilder’s camp has made much of former heavyweight contender Malik Scott slotting in as new head trainer.

Scott certainly talks a good game, spouting the kind of bullish psychobabble that is grist to the mill of a man like Wilder, for whom delusional is his natural state.

“All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity,” German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointed out, and the raft of excuses Wilder’s come up with to explain his devastating loss in his previous encounter with Fury confirms that he was never more right.

Then again, for the Alabaman to accept that the reason he lost almost every second of every round the last time he faced Fury was simply because he was in with a guy who’s got his number, this would mean him actually facing reality and grappling with all of the attendant demons unleashed thereby.

In that previous encounter, Fury arrived in the ring with the closest thing to a perfect game plan possible to muster in a boxing ring.

From the opening bell right up to when the fight was stopped in the seventh round, when cornerman Mark Breland threw in the towel to save his career, Wilder got blown around the ring like a badly pitched tent in a high wind.

In exposing serious structural weaknesses, which up until then had lain concealed behind a freakish right hand, Fury did what no other man had against Wilder.

In truth, Wilder looked way out of his depth and all the guff he’s been talking ever since about Fury cheating, having something in his gloves, about his ring entrance outfit being too heavy and leaving him with no legs in the ring, about Breland being in on some kind of conspiracy against him, all of it has been unedifying to listen to.

The key factor in this third encounter revolves, in my view, less around if and what Wilder can do differently, and more around what version of Fury turns up.

Covid in Fury’s camp put paid to this fight’s originally scheduled date back in July, and since then Fury has had to deal with a seriously ill newborn baby at home in Morecambe.

How much, if at all, has this impacted his preparations? And, too, is he entering this fight in any way complacent after dominating Wilder so completely last time?

In the usual round of fight week media appearances, the self-styled Gypsy King has come over relaxed and completely confident not only of emerging victorious, but doing so by knocking Wilder “spark out.”

For Wilder, meanwhile, the unseemly rhetoric of death and combat has rolled off the man’s tongue, just as it always does in the lead-up to a fight.

He wants retribution, revenge, wants to hurt Fury bad, do some damage, etc, etc. 

It’s the talk not of a fighter but of a man who is manifestly disturbed and buoyed in this state by an entourage of cheerleaders who were out in force at the pre-fight press conference on Wednesday.

This was a shambolic affair involving the fighters shouting insults at one another and which culminated in a thuggish Bob Arum launching a foul-mouthed tirade to reporters against moderator Lucy Abdo for daring to invite Fury and Wilder to stage a face-off at the end of proceedings, and then having one of said reporters thrown out of the room on the back of another foul-mouthed explosion for daring to tell him an uncomfortable truth over his handling of the affairs of Teofimo Lopez.

Fury will doubtless be looking forward to putting Wilder in his rearview and finally moving on from this chapter in his career.

The first fight in December 2018 was one of the most gripping affairs witnessed in a ring in years, heralding the near miraculous comeback of a man who only the year before was on his haunches.

The second fight was also gripping, proving beyond peradventure that Fury is the most devastating and skilled heavyweight of the modern era when at his best.

Another dominant Fury performance and victory will allow us to wonder yet again at the power of the human spirit when engaged in the struggle for redemption.