Otto Wallin advises Anthony Joshua should not seek a rematch against IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois after being destroyed by him in five rounds on September 21. Former AJ cancellation 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 knock down Joshua, it looked like AJ wasn’t ready defensively for him. They were not ready for Dubois to fight so aggressively, which made it difficult for Joshua to get his feet to throw the right hand.
Joshua couldn’t get full power to his right and hit accurately when he was pressured by incoming fire. It’s always been a flaw in his game, and Dubois has taken advantage of it.
“I wouldn’t recommend 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 that. The easy answer is to say no, it shouldn’t come back.”
Joshua would be crazy if he took the rematch with Dubois because this guy is all wrong for him. He is too young, powerful and robust to be trifled with. Dubois probably beat Joshua first in the rematch, and that would have messed things up for a fight with Tyson Fury.
“Dubois did a great job. With Joshua, I felt like he was caught off guard. He never entered the fight. It was Dubois’ night. Qu’il soit sorti et qu’il ait pu take on Joshua so easy,” Wallin said of what impressed him most about Dubois’ performance, and he continued to land.
“When I fought Joshua, he had good defense. I felt he was hard to hit, but Dubois landed everything. He had his hands really low, which surprised me, and he also had his chin in the air ” Wallin said of Joshua.
“He wasn’t able to use his footwork either. It looked like Joshua was working against him, and I felt like they thought it was easy to hit Dubois because we saw in the Hrgovic fight that he was hit with a lot of 1-2. I think they thought Joshua could land it pretty easily,” Wallin said.
Joshua and his promoter, Eddie Hearn, would never have taken the fight with Dubois if they didn’t believe they could capitalize on the runaway defense he had shown in his previous bout against Filip Hrgovic. Hearn must have thought that Joshua would have little problem landing a right hand against Dubois because there is no way they would have agreed to fight if they thought he would be hard to hit or if his offense was lethal.
“You could see at the start of the fight that Joshua threw a right hand, but he couldn’t land it cleanly on Dubois, which was surprising. He must have worked on that defense.
“I think they thought Joshua was going to be able to land his right hand and knock him out, but I think what happened was that Dubois was so aggressive that he pushed Joshua back. So it was a shock to them, and Dubois was a little hard to hit for them in this fight,” said Wallin.
Dubois and his trainer, Don Charles, seem to know that Joshua would struggle to bring pressure, and hit hard. It looked like he could charge the right hand at will. When Joshua clipped Dubois in the fifth, it came when Daniel was given time to stay on the outside and hesitate instead of attacking the way he had done in rounds 1 through 3.
