Classic Forum Chat: Size isn't the only factor.

You and freaking Dereck Chisora. Chisora is the British Jesse Ferguson. Get over it.

 

It does seem a little curious that a professional athlete with more experience in boxing than 99% of this forum would choose a transparently stupid game plan against Usyk.

I'm rather partial to a comment I saw on the General Forum defending Joshua's corner. It was pointed out that, after all, they know Joshua a lot better than we do. Maybe he would have lost by a wider margin if he hadn't followed that game plan.

As you pointed out, Joshua inflicted a fair amount of damage on Usyk despite losing. Could be a different gameplan leaves Usyk in better shape, not worse.

 

You can give any number of historical parallel fights you like because there's no one like Usyk. I was looking at cruiser and LHW history against elite SHW's to conclude whether Usyk had a good chance and my conclusion was that he didn't unless he was a good bit better than Holyfield. I believed he was, which is why I thought he would win something like 7-5 or 8-4 in Britain and get robbed on the cards. I was very pleasantly surprised when he won 11-1 or 10-2 with a 10-8 round at the end so that even Howard Foster (who scored the first two rounds to AJ) couldn't deny Usyk a UD.

Your prediction was a 1-2 round job where AJ would smash Usyk as if it was Tyson-Spinks or Frazier-Foster. You clearly did not have any idea what you were talking about and made some utterly ludicrous claims, such as a single win over 40+ Ortiz was better than beating 35 year old Usyk and 39 year old Povetkin put together. So when you repeat the BS Matchroom narrative that "it was all down to AJ's cr*p gameplan" you must realise you have lost credibility.

AJ is a fraud in the same way that Mike Tyson was a fraud: a very good fighter but massively overhyped relative to his actual ability, with serious weaknesses that good opponents (or even relatively poor opponents like Douglas and Ruiz) could exploit.

AJ's team chose that strategy because they believed it had the best chance of success. People are only dogpiling now because it failed! If AJ had rushed in, gassed out, got dropped and got stopped, people would be saying "why didn't gold medalist AJ pace himself and box at range with his length advantage?"

This means that AJ's team have to go for plan B in the rematch which is painfully predictable for Usyk, while AJ will have even less confidence and even more pressure on him to perform. If you are still picking AJ then you have a problem here, the bookies certainly aren't! Usyk is an almost prohibitive favourite to win the rematch lmao, potential tactical changes accounted for. Countless sympathetic people in the British boxing media are telling AJ to swerve the rematch rather than try again with a different strategy. It's over for AJ.

 

Exactly. These people are not idiots. They get things wrong ofc but if they believed that AJ could steamroll Usyk, they would have prepared him for exactly that. His team of well-paid pros clearly had little confidence in his ability to do so!

 

Fighters adopt dumb game plans from time to time. Like I posted earlier, in Hagler's last fight, the Petronellis decided he should start the fight Orthodox to "trick" Leonard.

Sometimes, fighters and their corners do unexplicably dumb things at the absolute worst time.

Maybe they heard THE WHOLE PLANET say Joshua should go out and stop Usyk early, and they decided to stay back and jab to prove "who knows what?"

But it was a bad strategy.

When you're the bigger, stronger, younger guy, you play to your strengths. Joshua didn't. When Usyk saw what Joshua was doing, he capitalized on it. I loved watching it.

That said, people who say it was a mismatch just aren't being honest. Nearly every round was close until the very end. Nobody was bored because Joshua wasn't in the fight at all. We weren't watching Holmes-Ali for God's sake.

 

Minus corruption, he's on a par with 2 loss (1 loss at the time) Whyte and slightly better than 2 loss Parker.

When it suits you, you claim that Parker could have 6 losses without favouritism (which is a stretch but not absurd) so which is it?

 

Could be bad strategy, but I think the default assumption should be a non-stupid game plan without clear evidence to the contrary. Who knows what would have happened if AJ had caught Usyk in later rounds enough to KO him? Gameplan wouldn't seem so stupid then.

Eh, we'll see soon enough, when the rematch happens. No need for everyone to get wound up yet when somebody's probably going to get proven right.

Where you're going, Anakin, I can't follow.

 

This wasn't an individual doing or advising something dumb on the fly; it was a strategy that his extremely expensive team of experts had prepared him for meticulously over the course of months, that he had been extensively trained to carry out.

AJ was playing to his key strength: A-side/home favouritism. But it turned out that he wasn't good enough to execute plan A and didn't have the physical, psychological or technical attributes to attempt "plan B" at any point, or to devise one on the fly.

I wasn't bored because I assumed that AJ had the power to change the fight at any time: a dubious assumption in retrospect. But Usyk won nearly all of the rounds if you mute the volume and ignore the propaganda. AJ wasn't a punching bag like Ali but he clearly got outclassed.

 

When it suits you, you spend weeks claiming Wilder is an all-time great, and in the very next breath you post this:

"I know what I'm seeing; Wilder is a broken man with nothing more than a small puncher's chance in the rematch. Usyk would school him at least 8 times out of 10 because Szpilka and Ortiz are massively inferior and considerably inferior southpaw boxers respectively and were both up on my cards at the time of the stoppages. Wilder wouldn't even take the Usyk fight if he had the belt: he is, like AJ, a protected fighter."

Wilder has never ducked Usyk. And every southpaw you mentioned Wilder WASTED. Hell, Szpilka was unconscious for five minutes and carried out of the ring on stretcher was never the same again.

Wilder won't fight Usyk because he nearly KILLED Szpilka and floored Ortiz FOUR times in two fights and stopped him?

Great logic. Christ. "Boy, don't want to fight Usyk. I've fought seven southpaws so far and nearly killed them all. Don't want to do that anymore."

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Tyson was a 42-1 favourite against Douglas, similar to how AJ was a 25-1 favourite against Ruiz. Both men were products of hype, frauds to some extent as they were being passed off as much better and less vulnerable than they actually were in reality.

 

In that case, I think we're using different definitions of "fraud."

When I hear "fraud," I don't think of a dominant, undisputed heavyweight champion who unified the belts and zapped the best fighters around at the time.

If you mean Tyson was a "fraud" in the narrow sense that he wasn't literally the superhuman murder machine you'd need to be to justify 42-1 odds against a top contender, I suppose that's defensible. But in hindsight, I can't think of any heavyweights I'd give 42-1 odds to beat Buster that night.

 

Wilder is/was an ATG but so was Ali when he fought Holmes, he was just physically shot. Wilder is not shot physically but he may well be shot mentally. Szpilka and Ortiz were up on my cards but Wilder was only down on the official cards before the stoppage in one of those fights (Ortiz 2) because Wilder's team of highly paid experts knew he had A-side/home advantage so he didn't have to expend too much energy boxing for points while his opponents did.

Every inferior southpaw got wasted yes (though Szpilka and Ortiz went on to get some of their best wins) but they gave Wilder more trouble than anyone barring No.1 Fury, who is a switch hitter. Usyk has the quality to take Wilder's right hand out of play and undress him, he actually regards Wilder as an easier fight than AJ. I don't agree with him though as Wilder is faster, longer, tougher, more aggressive, much more explosive etc. etc. than AJ and Wilder has far more experience sparring and fighting southpaws. AJ loses to Usyk 9/10 times, Wilder 8/10 times but Usyk is a nightmare stylistic matchup for both of them. He is for practically anybody truth be told.

 

I don't think Tyson beat anyone close to the quality of a Bowe or Lewis who both came later, maybe not even a Holyfield. The narrative in the 90's was that Tyson needed to get out of prison so he could save a pathetically weak division, filled with frauds like glass jaw Lewis and non-punching pumped up cruiser Holyfield, where men in their early 40's could beat top contenders and become champions.

AJ was a 2x 3 belt unified champ with 7 defences, beat many good names and top contenders (according to the rankings)
Tyson was undisputed in an era with fewer belts and had 9 defences, beat many good names and top contenders (according to the rankings)

Both failed spectacularly against absurdly long underdogs: AJ's loss was arguably less severe as he was essentially KO'd with one punch and avenged the defeat immediately via near shut out UD. Great champions typically find ways to beat motivated B/C level opponents when the champions are having an off day but neither AJ or Tyson were able to do so here. In Tyson's case, he crumbled nearly every time he faced serious adversity in his career and I suspect AJ will go on to replicate that.

Both got undressed when facing near-prime elite opponents in their respective eras.

Both were hyped to no end as unbeatable killing machines (in Tyson's case even after he got out of prison, after over 4 years of inactivity post-Douglas).

In my view, they were both massively overhyped in a manner that was obviously fraudulent in retrospect.

 

Lewis is actually a good parallel. I don't think McCall or Rahman were any better than Douglas, and both upset Lewis. Bowe technically didn't get upset by Golota, but received a pasting every bit as brutal as the one Tyson got from Douglas. Bowe was only saved by an even less predictable outcome than Douglas's 42-1 underdog win (i.e., Golota just happened to be a compulsive groin puncher.) And then there's Moorer/Holyfield...

In short, 42-1 underdog status was unrealistic for anyone, period. A contender always has the chance to upset the champ.

So...Tyson was overrated and overhyped, yes. But, IMO, only because people had unrealistic expectations of him that no human being could fulfill. He remains a great heavyweight even when you dispel the mirage surrounding him. He also beat everybody available until Douglas, and his opposition consisted of the beltholders and top contenders.

 

Lewis got KO'd with one punch both times, which exposed a leaky defence, lack of focus and suspect chin but he was never beaten up over the course of 9 or 10 rounds and KO'd by a B/C level guy as Tyson was. Bowe was incredibly undisciplined and a shot fighter before he hit 30. Prime Moorer was good, highly rated in the rankings over a long period, a fast and tricky southpaw (a new phenomenon at the time). Holyfield losing an MD there did expose limitations but it was not a terrible defeat and Holyfield was never hyped much, he was perpetually written off if anything. Bowe and Lewis never got anything close to the hype that Tyson did.

I don't think AJ or Tyson were bad fighters as I've said, they're both very good to be among the best in the world in their craft but the hype for both was absurd. People had been fed these unrealistic expectations from the boxing media at the time, which was peddling fraudulent narratives.