Entourage. A champions downfall?

Could be, but I feel it goes both ways. The people you surround yourself with reflects on you as a person. Surrounding yourself with yes-men is not a champion mentality.

 

Some good points,, I seriously doubt Roberto Duran would have achieved much of anything without Arcel and Freddy Brown to try and keep him focused. As it was once he became rich he imploded. Entourages are the textbook definition of leeches.

 

Keeping entourages are worse than going to whores, you lose money and focus without even getting your **** sucked.

 

Just saw a training clip of Crawford where he had a hype man shouting at him the whole training session. Is this new? It's never a good look, really.

Seems like Mayweather wanted/needed it in the twilight of his career when he was no longer prime.

It shows the change from being intrinsically motivated to needing to be extrinsically motivated. When a fighter makes this transformation, their prime is typically over.

 

When you're a rich celebrity and a champion like Tyson was, the parasites naturally flock to you. That aura of winning naturally attracts these people to you.

I recommend watching the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary on Tyson/Douglas '42-to-1'. It's a great documentary that really goes into the fight from Douglas' side. But the subtext in that documentary is that Douglas ultimately won because he had good people around him. Moreover, the bad people avoided him because he never lived up to his potential, he was a three times beaten fighter who nobody thought was anything. Whereas Tyson, who was a superstar before he even turned 20, had Don King and his gang of parasites sniffing around him long before he'd even officially signed with King

 

It's the mirror image, AJ is telling his team what they want to hear. He is clearly focused and training hard, I think his team is focused too, but he's got no one in his camp that has answers for Usyk.

The big question though is who do you even bring in? A lot of the obvious guys have passed away, retired, or are training Tyson Fury. Some others are just hard to imagine them fitting in.

 

Joshua's problem is the loss of confidence. He's had this pretty much since Klitschko and big time after Ruiz. You can see that he doesn't let his hands go the way he used to . He's probably afraid he'll tire himself out and get caught like in the Klitschko fight.

There was never any moment in the Usyk fight where he came out charging like he did against Wlad in Round 5. He never had that moment that fighters do when they realise they're down on the cards and they've got to win (and Joshua and his corner must have realised he was down on the cards) and come out guns blazing, as Tyson did against Douglas. Or Holyfield did against Lewis. Or McCall did against Bruno.

Until Joshua deals with his confidence issues he is, for all practical purposes, finished. Doesn't matter what other adjustments he might make

 

I don't agree that AJ and his corner must have realised he was down on the cards. We've seen some pretty shocking hometown decisions over the years and saw one on that very card with Campbell Hatton. McCracken gave AJ the gameplan for AJ to stay on his feet and finish the fight, with a robbery considered the most viable path to victory. They probably thought that in Tottenham with undisputed potentially just around the corner, there was no way Usyk could win a points decision barring multiple KD's (a logic I agreed with pre-fight). It also explains why Wlad never went for it against Fury: he didn't want to risk gassing out, getting countered and being dropped or taken out and thought he'd get a corrupt decision anyway. This is one of the scenarios where home advantage can become home disadvantage.

The post-fight behaviour of Wlad and AJ also confirm this theory: Wlad is raising his arms in anticipation of the decision, while AJ is left mouth agape when he hears the words "And the new!" before shrugging his shoulders. I agree that AJ has confidence issues and they will be even worse following this defeat (he's now been beaten fighting offensively against a blob and defensively against a cruiser) but it wasn't a reluctance to let his hands go that cost him this fight. Clearly McCracken believed that if AJ had tried that, Usyk would have had a very good chance of taking him out.

 

I agree that they must have had that in their minds but I suppose what I meant to say is that AJ and his corner must have realised that he wasn't doing enough to win.
Rob and the corner made a lot of assumptions during the fight. I think they genuinely believed that the natural cruiserweight Usyk who's not used to being a heavyweight, would get tired as the fight drew on. Instead Usyk could have easily done another 12 rounds. It was AJ who got tired

 

I agree that he wasn't doing enough to win on any scorecard vaguely resembling reality. I find it difficult to believe they thought Usyk would be the one to tire considering his notoriously outstanding stamina and AJ's notoriously poor stamina, especially considering that the gameplan was not to pressure or wrestle Usyk, which are classic ways of tiring the smaller man.

 

Well this is the problem. Joshua never used what he had. He never clinched with him and leaned on him. He was at least quick enough to be able to cut off the ring and corner Usyk but he never did, and Joshua never used what should have been his superior strength.
I dunno if there's an answer for Usyk but there's definitely things Joshua could have tried