Eddie Hearn says he’s proud of how Anthony Joshua stood his ground in his devasting knockout loss to Daniel Dubois in London. He feels that Joshua (28-4, 23 KOs) showed a lot of courage to keep getting up after being repeatedly dropped by Dubois.
Joshua almost pulled off a huge comeback when he had Dubois hurt in the fifth round after nailing him with a monster right hand. Unfortunately for AJ, the first-round knockdown caused him to function at only “30%.”
Hearn believes the first round knockdown Joshua suffered cost him the fight because he never recovered from it. IBF heavyweight champion Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) took advantage of Joshua’s weakened punch resistance after round one to give him a bad shellacking in rounds two, three, four, and five.
AJ was down four times in the fight, and the final knockdown in the fifth was the brutal one because he looked close to being unconscious after getting hit with a right hand that he didn’t see coming from Dubois.
Fans on social media believe Joshua, 34, will never be the same after the beating he took against Dubois. It would be a good idea for Hearn to give up on his talk of a rematch because Joshua doesn’t need to face Dubois ever again after what he did to him.
“If you want drama, you got drama. Not in the way we wanted to. In the first round, he went straight back with his chin in the air and got hit with a monster right hand,” said Eddie Hearn to Charlie Parson’s YouTube channel, discussing Anthony Joshua’s loss to Daniel Dubois.
“In the second round, he took a shellacking. He was out of the fight; the fight was over. I actually thought the fight was over at the end of the second round, and the third round was just holding on for dear life. He actually was able to buzz Dubois in the third round, and it slowed Dubois down very slightly.”
Dubois didn’t look hurt by Joshua in the third. In the fourth, Dubois was slightly stunned by one of Joshua’s right hands, but it wasn’t significant. It looked like Dubois was gassed out more than hurt in the round because he’d thrown a lot of shots in rounds one and two.
“Then, in the fourth round, I started to think, ‘He’s getting his wind back, AJ.’ He hurt Dubois again in the fourth round, and then in the fifth round, he [Joshua] had him. He hit him with a monster right hand, and the legs went, Dubois. The problem was that AJ was about 30% at that point,” said Hearn.
Joshua was desperate by the fifth round. So, he chose to go full in for the knockout when he stunned Dubois with a big shot. If AJ had taken a cautious approach, he wasn’t going to last much longer anyway. He wasn’t the same after the first round, and Dubois continually hurt him.
“He came in to try and finish the job and walked onto a monster right hand from Dubois, and that was all she wrote,” said Hearn. “I was thinking, ‘If we come back from here, this will be one of the greatest comeback victories of all time.’ But unfortunately, he walked onto a big right hand.
“I said to him, ‘You couldn’t have done any more. When it’s all over, you can look at yourself in the mirror and say I tried my absolute nuts in there tonight.’ He gave it everything. Congradulations to Daniel Dubois. He had a perfect start.”
It’s a tough loss for Joshua to accept because he was the favorite to win and was fighting a guy with nowhere near the same experience or career achievements. Joshua wans’t supposed to lose this fight, yet he did.
You can blame the loss on Joshua coming in looking bulky, carrying around too much muscle, and backing up when under attack by Dubois. All of those things were too much for Joshua to overcome against a fighter with youth and power that Dubois had.
“That was a worry, I guess, and it just got worse. He came through some big shots as well. He was hurt, and he stood his ground. What AJ did was he held his feet and never stopped trying to land big shots,” said Hearn.
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