Journalist Gareth A. Davies doesn’t believe a rematch will happen between Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois in light of the outcome of their clash last month. He feels that there’s too much risk for Joshua being “mained and mauled” by IBF heavyweight champion Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) to face him a second time.
Gareth thinks that Joshua (28-4, 25 KOs) will instead sit and wait on the outcome of the Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk rematch on December 21st. If Fury loses, as most believe he will, Joshua will fight him next. There’s too much money available for AJ and Fury to grab for them not to fight.
Joshua looked out of his league last month, getting dropped four times in his fifth-round knockout loss to Dubois at Wembley Stadium in London. If that fight had been competitive, a rematch would potentially make sense. It wasn’t competitive, and a rematch would likely be a similar massacre.
“My gut feeling is it won’t,” said Gareth A. Davies to Pro Boxing Fans about whether the Anthony Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois rematch will happen. “In the end, my feeling is they’ll say, ‘Let’s just wait and see what happens with Fury and Usyk.’ If Fury loses Usyk the second time, maybe we put Joshua in with Fury now.
“If Fury wins, I think Fury and Usyk will probably have a trilogy. That’s the sense that I’m getting from people. My instinct is he [Joshua] won’t end up immediately rematching Daniel Dubois, but if he does, it’ll probably be in February.
“Punch resistance is gone? I don’t know about that. I think Daniel Dubois punches really hard,” said Gareth, reacting to being told that Carl Froch had commented about his belief that Joshua’s punch resistance is gone after watching him get obliterated by Dubois.
“He was caught flush early, and he spent nine minutes trying to recover and keep a foothold in the fight, which he did brilliantly to do. Then he threw his whole lot in the first minute of the fifth round, and then he got caught. In the meantime, he still did catch Daniel and caused some tremors,” said Gareth.
It’s not so much that Joshua’s punch resistance is gone, but rather, he never had any to begin with. The shots that Dubois repeatedly hurt Joshua with on September 21st would have done the same thing to him if he’d fought him earlier in his career in 2013 through 2017.
Joshua never had a good beard, but that weakness has been hidden due to his promoter, Eddie Hearn, matching him selectively against lesser fighters. If you look at Joshua’s career resume, it’s filled with beatable guys, many of them old.
Joshua’s best career opponents
– Wladimir Klitsschko: 41-years-old
– Andy Ruiz Jr.
– Kubrat Pulev: 39
– Oleksandr Usyk
– Francis Ngannou: 37
– Robert Helenius: 41
– Alexander Povetkin: 39
– Carlos Takam: 36
– Joseph Parker
– Dillian Whyte
– Otto Wallin
“Didn’t you all rise up out of your seats at that moment in the fifth round and think, ‘He’s going to turn this around. It’s unbelievable, and he’s going to be this concussed guy talking afterward when he’s won the fight.’” said Davies, talking about the brief moment of success AJ had in the fifth round before getting his lights turned out.
Gareth is going a little overboard, talking about Joshua backing Dubois up in the fifth round after catching him with a clean right hand. Dubois wasn’t hurt, and it was obvious that he was playing possum, looking to lure Joshua into a trap.
We saw Dubois do the same thing against Filip Hrgovic last June in Riyadh, and he destroyed him in eight rounds. Dubois took a lot more hard right hands from Hrgovic than he did against Joshua, and he held up just fine. The punches that Hrgovic hit Dubois with were almost as powerful as the one AJ tagged him with in the fifth.
“My personal view is Joshua should sit it out until Fury and Usyk have fought. That’s my view rather than taking the immediate rematch against Daniel Dubois. Is it a wise move if he gets kind of maimed and mauled another time in a second fight against Dubois,” said Gareth.
Joshua would surely be mauled in a second fight by Dubois, and it wouldn’t matter one bit if the rematch were delayed until February or March next year. Dubois is too powerful, young, and sturdy in the chin department for Joshua, who is aging, to defeat him.
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