Dillian Whyte’s head coach thinks that his title fight with Tyson Fury has come at just the right time.
The WBC mandatory challenger waited three years for his chance and only a brief interruption when he lost and then regained his interim championship from Alexander Povetkin halted his reign.
After Anthony Joshua’s defeat to Oleksandr Usyk and the activation of a rematch clause it suspended the chances of an undisputed fight between either of the pair and Fury, and set up Whyte to finally be given the nod.
34-year-old Whyte now faces Fury on Saturday night at Wembley Stadium, and the challenger has opened up a little more to the media in recent days, but is largely a remote figure after agreeing the terms of the fight.
That time has been spent in the gym preparing for his opportunity, and is head coach Xavier Miller believes that all the work done in the past two years sets him up for a strong performance.
"I think it's a case of locking ourselves away for the past couple of years in Portugal, I think it's being involved in three or four different training camps, I think it's speaking to Dillian earlier on when I got appointed as head coach and saying 'we need to improve on certain aspects of your game'," Miller said to Sky Sports.
"He's a tremendous fighter, a tremendous fighter.
"His ceiling is a lot higher than where it is right now and that's why I've been working so hard.
"I'm ultra confident, ultra confident."
Whyte has defeated some top names in the division such as Derek Chisora, Robert Helenius, Lucas Brown and Joseph Parker, though he suffered a defeat to Joshua in 2015 and Povetkin in 2020.
"I think some of it is we've just had to go back to basics," Miller explained. "I think because I spent so long building fighters from scratch, there's a format and that takes time.
"No matter how anybody wants to spin it, you don't just get a fighter in who hasn't fought for world titles yet and change things immediately.
"There are things that had to be worked on, we've taken our time and done that.
"Honestly the fight couldn't come at a better time, it's now."
Miller backed Whyte’s power as a threat, with his most recent victory coming with a powerful knockout against Povetkin.
"You don't have to be a boxing coach to see (how Whyte can hurt Fury)," Miller claimed.
"If Dillian catches you clean you're dropped. The problem is you've got to keep Tyson Fury there.
"You give credit where it's due, when he has gone down he's got up. He's got a lot of heart, he wants to fight, but our job is once we've got him down to keep him down, that's our job."