Otto Wallin is recommending that Anthony Joshua should not take the rematch against IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois after he was destroyed by him in five rounds on September 21. 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 given how easily Dubois (22-2, 21 KOs) was able to hit Joshua, it looked like AJ wasn’t ready for him defensively. They weren’t ready for Dubois to fight so aggressively, making it difficult for Joshua to set his feet to throw his right hand.
Joshua can’t get full power to his right and hits with accuracy when pressed by incoming fire. This has always been a flaw in his game, and Dubois has taken advantage of it.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” said Otto Wallin 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 should not rematch.”
Joshua will be crazy if he takes the rematch with Dubois because this guy is wrong for him. He is too young, powerful and sturdy to mess with. Dubois would probably knock Joshua out earlier in the rematch, and that would mess things up for a fight with Tyson Fury.
“Dubois did a very good job. With Joshua I felt he was caught off guard. He never got into the fight. It was Dubois’ night. That he came out and could hit Joshua so easily,” Wallin said of what impressed him 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 very low, which surprised me, and he also had his chin in the air,” Wallin said of Joshua.
“He couldn’t use his footwork either. Joshua seemed to be 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 Joshua was going to land pretty easily,” Wallin said.
Joshua and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, would never have taken the fight against Dubois if they didn’t believe they could capitalize on the leaky defense he showed in his previous bout against Filip Hrgovic. Hearn must have thought that Joshua would have little trouble landing his right hand against Dubois because there is no way they would have agreed to fight him if they thought he would be hard to hit or if his offense was lethal not.
“You could see early in the fight that Joshua was throwing the right hand, but he couldn’t land it cleanly on Dubois, which was surprising. They should have worked on that defense.
“I think they thought Joshua was going to be able to sit 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 for them, and Dubois was pretty tough to hit for them in this fight,” Wallin said.
Dubois and his trainer, Don Charles, seemed to know that Joshua would struggle by applying pressure and hitting hard. He seemed to be able to raise his right hand at will. When Joshua Dubois did snap in the fifth, it came when Daniel gave him time by standing on the outside and hesitating rather than attacking as he had done in rounds 1 through 3.
