Aside fron the stuning knockout victories of Floyd Mayweather, Manny Pacquiao and Naoya Inoue, there has been no major excitement in the sports recently until last 21 September 2024.
In front of 96,000 fans at Wembley in London, England, Daniel Dubois got the better of Anthony Joshua en route to a signature victory.
Dubois hurt Joshua early in the first round of the IBF title showdown, and the result after that seemed obvious and inevitable. Joshua attempted to keep pushing through multiple knockdowns, but then finally got put down and out for the final time in the fifth round of the headlining act.
The combat sports community was following along closely with the match, and everyone was shock.
Overpowered, overwhelmed, and now, surely, over the hill, the 34-year old Joshua was dealt his gravest humiliation yet. His every defence dismantled by Dubois in 4-and-a-half astonishingly one-sided rounds.
If the fallen champion looked as if he had seen a ghost, then so too did his impresario Eddie Hearn, whose masterplan to restore his man to the summit of the sport has now officially been reduced to matchwood.
There had long been doubts over Joshua’s chin, given his knockdowns against Wladimir Klitschko in 2017 and, shockingly, the corpulent Andy Ruiz Jnr two years later. However, all these anxieties had been assuaged by the authority of his recent victories, with coach Ben Davison showing signs of restoring him to the dominance of old.
The 21st of September will not be favorabke to Joshua though. He will remember this as an evening when everything went wrong in the most chastening possible way and that his career was running out of road.
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