AS 96,000 people streamed out of the Wembley gates, a well-stacked pile of best-laid plans floated gently into the London night sky. Before his headline assignment against Daniel Dubois, Anthony Joshua, the pay-per-view star and long-time poster boy of British boxing, was already being asked about potential battles with the likes of Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk.
Fury and Usyk are tied up in a December rematch, while AJ has already failed to better Usyk over 24 rounds. That had not stopped talk of Joshua’s next moves, should he beat Daniel Dubois…
After his fellow British banger iced AJ, a rematch now seems more realistic than a clash with either of the big boys. It had all been going so swimmingly under the stewardship of new trainer Ben Davison.
Wins built upon wins. Momentum gently gathered. Joshua looked confident when dispatching the likes of Robert Helenius, Otto Wallin and Francis Ngannou. But none of them brought the hunger and raw punching power of Frank Warren’s dynamite destroyer.
The rebuild would only be officially completed when a win over a live dog was achieved. As Ben Davison jumped into the ring, pushing referee Marcus McDonnell aside, with Joshua lying stricken on the canvas, the latest part of Operation AJ was a crime scene clean-up.
Brushing past a quartet of fringe contenders, including a noble art novice (Ngannou) who had raised his stock from a Fury ruffling, Joshua had his eyes on that three-time world championship reign.
It wasn’t to be. Daniel Dubois saw to that. Joshua was ropey from the start. Staggering, dazed, clinging on in the clinches, neglecting his top-class jab as the brain cells fluttered. Even though it’s not ideal, a Dubois rematch is the comeback key for a 34-year-old stumbling towards the end. Failure to right the wrongs of last night will mean the end of any fleeting hopes of Fury or Usyk.