Otto Wallin advises that Anthony Joshua shouldn’t take the rematch against IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois after being destroyed by him in five rounds on September 21st. The former AJ knockout victim, Wallin, sees no reason for Joshua (28-4, 25 KOs) to take the second fight unless he thinks he can win.
Wallin says that given how easily Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) was able to hit Joshua, it looked like AJ wasn’t ready defensively for him. They weren’t ready for Dubois to fight so aggressively, which made it difficult for Joshua to set his feet to throw his right hand.
Joshua can’t get full power on his right and hit with accuracy when he’s being pressured by incoming fire. That’s always been a flaw in his game, and Dubois took advantage of it.
“I wouldn’t advise for it,” said Otto Wallin to Boxing News when asked if Anthony Joshua should take the rematch with Daniel Dubois. “For now, I don’t see a reason for it. The easy answer is to say no, he shouldn’t rematch.”
Joshua would be crazy if he took the rematch with Dubois because this guy is all wrong for him. He’s too young, powerful, and sturdy to be messing around with. Dubois would likely knock out Joshua earlier in the rematch, and that would mess up things for a fight with Tyson Fury.
“Dubois did a really good job. With Joshua, I felt like he was caught off guard. He never got into the fight. That was Dubois’ night. That he came out and was able to hit Joshua so easy,” said Wallin about what impressed him the most about Dubois’ performance, and he kept landing.
“When I fought Joshua, he had good defense. I felt it was hard to hit him, but Dubois landed everything. He had his hands really low, which surprised me, and he had his chin up in the air also,” said Wallin about Joshua.
“He wasn’t able to use his footwork as well. It looked like Joshua had been working on countering, and I felt like they thought it was going to be easy to hit Dubois because we saw in the Hrgovic fight that he got hit with a lot of 1-2s. I think they figured that Joshua was going to be able to land pretty easily,” said Wallin.
Joshua and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, would have never taken the fight with Dubois if they didn’t believe they could capitalize on the leaky defense that he’d shown in his previous clash against Filip Hrgovic. Hearn must have thought that Joshua would have little problem landing his right hand against Dubois because there’s no chance they would have agreed to fight him if they thought he’d be hard to hit or if his offense was lethal.
“You could see early in the fight that Joshua threw the right hand, but he couldn’t land it cleanly on Dubois, which was surprising. They must have worked on that defense.
“I think they thought that Joshua was going to be able to sit down on his right hand and take him out, but I think what happened was Dubois was so aggressive that he pushed Joshua back. So, it was a shock to them, and Dubois was kind of hard to hit for them in this fight,” said Wallin.
Dubois and his trainer, Don Charles, seems to know that Joshua would struggle by bring pressured, and hit hard. He looked like he could load up his right hand like he wanted. When Joshua did clip Dubois in the fifth, it came when Daniel gave him time by standing on the outside and hesitating rather than attacking the way he had done in rounds 1 through 3.
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