Verbal exchanges between Taylor and Catterall over twitter

I hear you, but these things are occupational hazards. Taylor will at some point have faced a man who had experienced a compound of struggles and well knew that nobody cared to hear about them after he'd had his ass kicked.

Josh should not have allowed himself to blow up (if he relaxed on account of cleaning up the belts, that's on him), and there are ways to work weight down even while carrying knocks. They fully rescheduled to legislate for the compound of injury and COVID-19. I'm not even a professional athlete and two bouts of the virus didn't keep me off the roads or out of S&C for more than a couple days combined. For a healthy man with the cardiovascular base Josh possesses, any residuals from the virus would have been of little moment and easily shaken off as his training resumed.

I probably sound unempathetic, but the circumstances don't warrant particular compassion as I see it.

If he rematches and whoops Jack, it'll be because he found some kind of adjustment to offset the issues he encountered in the first fight.

 

There were effectively two camps, though, (an abortive one and a completed one), as the bout was amply rescheduled to allow for the issues which were shown (with dramatic emphasis) in the documentary.

It's a rough with the smooth thing. Many camps are not plain sailing, guys still have to suck it up and go out and perform. Maybe Jack had his own issues to contend with. I just don't think we'd have been hearing much about Josh's if he'd done what he expected (and was expected) to do.

 

But it's squarely on him if he can command the luxury of a roomy reschedule and still emerge in a less than satisfactory state (which, I reaffirm, is not what he was very emphatically declaring just hours before the fight).


I have to give unequivocal credit to Jack.

 

I'm talking about the resumption of his camp (or Camp II, if you will). If Josh couldn't reconcile the difficulties of the first abortive camp and instead carried that emotional/mental baggage into the resumptive preparations, for which ample time had been allowed, it's his failing.

I only kept a loose track of how I felt the fight was going and still haven't gotten around to rewatching/scoring (I've been intending to for months, as I mentioned in the contemporaneous RBR thread). My impression was that it ended up very tight, tighter than a lot of people reckoned. Heck, I may even have Taylor grinding out the W on a more attentive inspection. Jack gave him a lot of problems, but TTT didn't look so debilitated to me — I put more store in the Englishman's endeavor than Josh's condition.

I can't knock Jack's craftiness. Josh did plenty of holding to stymie his prior opponent's offensive march and deny him a rhythm, and I didn't knock that, either.

 

I don't think he should've postponed, I'm saying that (accepting, for argument's sake, that this notoriously spiky, irritable fighter's mood was particularly out of sorts coming into the fight) he should've better reconciled the difficulties he'd experienced in Camp I instead of carrying the frustrations through to Camp II, should've gotten his act together. These are vagaries that all fighters deal with and only tend to become consequential when name guys lose (or look bad or less brilliant than usual). I didn't consider it a mitigating factor that AJ had looked somewhat disturbed or like a rabbit in the headlights in the immediate moments before the bell rung in NYC and Ruiz kicked his ass, either.


What Jack was doing (and what Josh did to Ramírez) is part of the sport, right down to the ostensibly non-competitive, purely educational/preparational level. If Guy A is doing rounds with Guy B in the gym and Guy B is stubbornly old-manning Guy A, recurringly tying him up to stop him turning the screw, (a situation I'm familiar with), the onus is on Guy A to be looking at what he can to do to stop him doing it. On the other hand, if you're the guy who needs the respite, the coach is going to remind you to "tie up if you need to" (even if it goes against your natural instinct, which, you might be surprised to know, it always has in my case — I'm far from a natural holder, and that has occasionally been to my detriment ).

By and large, I appreciate all stylistic facets of the sport. There are limits, of course, but I consider myself pretty liberal with those.

 

By the way, @Serge, I'm arguing for the sake of argument and because I think Josh (who I've made a conscious effort to warm to as a personality) is coming on like a brat lately, so your post piqued my interest in that particular conversation. I'm not attempting to give you a hard time. I figure we have enough mutual tolerance/understanding that we can hash out a disagreement without bad feeling or irritation.