Joshua takes mic after the fight and gives monologue

How the hell does he honestly think that he won that fight?.

He had one decent definitive round in round 9 and scraped a couple of others at best.

I hope he's watched the fight back now.

 

AJ's public meltdown will forever be remembered as 'The Vagina Monologue'.

 

You'd think he grew up in Windsor Castle, not the "mean streets" of Watford with all that entitlement.

Sad to see. His intial reaction to the result is good, then rapidly downhill.

 

He's one of the few guys out there who you can actually learn a lot about through how he speaks. Most don't give much away and he tries not to/Eddie has always tried not to let him....yet, I've known for years now that he was mentally broken, since Ruiz really.

 

That stupid juvenile voice he puts on during the Rocky Marciano part always gets me

 

He should've just carried on and stormed off backstage, it was petulant but he would've saved himself from the embarrassment that was to follow. I knew it was a big mistake when he started walking back to the ring.

 

I hope AJ is Man enough to realize his Ego weakness, work on his brain, & not minimize how he mistreated the event & Usyk.

 

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Be it in a boxing ring or a therapists chair, if you can understand the thoughts and motivations of another person then you've got them by their knackers.

For anyone that's spent time analysing behaviour, you can see the trigger point is when he walks past Usyk holding the belts. In the trade, we'd call the belts a 'transitional object' - something that provides meaning and comfort to a person. In this case, AJ's basically just had his teddy bear taken from him. And that makes him feel small, frightened.....and angry.

Before this Lomachenko told him he's "got heart". This is probably what hurt AJ the most - because he does have heart, and hearing that will make him feel 'seen'.

From that moment on he half-punches one Usyk team member, shoulder-barges the smallest member of Usyk's entourage, and then starts looking for a fight (that's why Usyk rightly said AJ was "bullying" his team).

Equally, the reason it didn't descend into a brawl is because Usyk and his team didn't really react. He quietly got the belts and went along with AJ's passive-aggressive cheering. It's another example of how Usyk's apparent calmness is the key to his effectiveness.

But the word of the day is shame. I remember a psychiatrist telling me that shame is the emotion that lies behind every aggressive act.

There's no shame in feeling shame; indeed, in professional sport - and perhaps everywhere else - there's an opportunity to use shame as something to drive you forward. If you can digest it first, that is.

The issue here is that AJ - although probably quite low after the first Usyk loss - never really hit the bottom of the shame barrel. He was advised - wrongly - to go straight into the rematch. This didn't give him the headspace to recover and reinvent himself. And reinventing himself is what he needed to do.

That's why Peter Fury rightly pointed out AJ's approach to this fight was basically the same as the first fight - there was no reinvention. Lots of hard work, a fancy new coach, lots of determination, but no reinvention.

Lewis and Fury are good examples of how you can take a long time out and come back reinvented.

So where does this leave him? Unless he reinvents himself, he is who he is. He's got physical gifts, but people are figuring him out. Maybe he'll club a few contenders, but the psychologically elite - Fury, Usyk, Joyce, and Wilder - will chew him up.

For Usyk, Fury is a challenge. Aside from Fury's physical and skill advantages, he's also got experience in cutting-through the calmness of a Ukrainian opponent - indeed, he's already started doing this.

There are a few examples of Usyk beginning to show some cracks in his self-belief. I think Fury will continue to exploit these and probably target Alex Krassyuk, too. I know I would

And for anyone looking for some advice in psychologically decimating your opponent before any bell rings: hit me up.

☮️

 

You forgot to mention Freud

 

Yeah, Freud, Jung and Klein never really provided a psychotherapeutic understanding of contemporary boxing. Losers.

 

I wonder if Usyk would've held on to the Ring belt would they have engaged in a sudden tug of war, not unlike a pair of 5 year old girls squabbling over a Barbie doll. Imagine Joshua's childlike frown...

 

Great question, and it goes to the heart of unraveling Usyk. Who has their belts taken from them and does nothing but pull a silly face?!

Is it that different from Klitschko stood there with that silly grin after Chisora spat water in his face?

Maybe there's something in the water in the Ukraine, which makes you confuse being a sap with being noble?.....

 

I was hoping AJ would give us some rocky IV and start shouting, "if i can change... and you can change... EVERYBODY CAN CHANGE!"

 

Cringe is feeling extreme second hand embarrassment a lot of the time. Feeling embarrassed for someone making a tit of themselves isn't low T behaviour. Look at Usyk sure, he had the same expression most of us would've had at that meltdown.