_1625301120.jpg)
Sunny Edwards does not spend much time studying his opponents, but that does not mean he is taking them lightly.
Edwards makes the first defence of the IBF flyweight title – which he won from Moruti Mthalane in April – when he faces Jayson Mama in Dubai on Saturday. The Filipino is unbeaten in 16 fights, the same as Edwards, but has more of a reputation as a heavy hitter. Edwards, though, he says most of what he needs to know about Mama will be learnt in the ring.
“My scouting mission will be the first three rounds,” Edwards said. “I don’t like to spend too long studying videos of them against other people, because they will never have been in the ring with someone like me before.
“Maybe I can make this easy, maybe he will drag something out of me. If you go in and think you are levels above someone, you are often shown that you are not.
“He’s got heavy hands, he likes to plant his feet and he doesn’t seem to care what is coming back, sometimes. He is not like me tip-tapping around, he brings war and heat.
“I’ve got a lot more strings to my bow than I have shown so far. If you can give yourself the biggest chance of winning because every exchange they only have a puncher’s chance, that’s what I’ll do..
“If it comes to a point that I am behind and have to make something happen, I’ve got that in me.”
Edwards, 25, had been due to face Mama at the Copper Box in London in September, only for an ankle injury to Edwards to force a postponement.
Switching the fight to Dubai, where it will headline Probellum’s debut show, was the way Edwards got to box again before Christmas.
“They were struggling with dates,” Edwards said. “I was being told dates in February and March, but Frank Warren and Probellum came together and worked something out.
“I’ve been training all year. I came into the new year knowing I had my world title shot lined up. And within five days of that I was back in the gym. I thought ‘if my mandatory gets called, I have to be ready’.
“I did hundreds of rounds sparring, hundreds of miles running. At the last minute it got called off and I adapted. I was doing bags on an office chair and instead of running, I was on a bike.
“I didn’t want to train all year to have one fight.”
It also means that Edwards, who is something of a gym rat, will be able to have Christmas off, which is something he promised himself he always would have.
“I always said I will fight anytime anywhere, apart from the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day because it is my favourite week of the year,” Edwards said. “Because my birthday is January 1. Give me eight weeks either side of that and I am good to go.
“If I don’t spar for 2-3 weeks, I don’t really feel alive. It’s the only thing that makes hair stand up, that physical chess match. It’s all I have ever done since I was 9 years old.
“It’s so engrained in my DNA, I don’t know what I would do without it.”
Edwards stepped up on previous promise when he outboxed Mthalane to take the title, but he is not about to get carried away with that.
“All the supportive comments are very nice, but as someone told me very early in in my career, you create the hype, you don’t believe it,” he said.
“But it is all hyperbole. For everyone saying it was a masterclass, there is someone saying it was just against an old man.”
Edwards only flew out to Dubai on Monday, have cheered on his close friend Lyndon Arthur in his defeat against Lyndon Arthur last Saturday, but he is not expecting to be bothered by jetlag.
“I am expecting a good hard fight this time,” he said. “But it is not like last time when I was facing someone with all their man strength and experience. He is a bit younger than me and greener than me.
“I’ve got some old man tricks up my sleeve.”
Ron Lewis is a senior writer for BoxingScene. He was Boxing Correspondent for The Times, where he worked from 2001-2019 – covering four Olympic Games and numerous world title fights across the globe. He has written about boxing for a wide variety of publications worldwide since the 1980s.