Joshua's performance vs Ruiz II is seriously underrated

Ruiz just wasn't that great to begin with TBH. It really was not a 'tactical' masterstroke that people say it is.

Was the beginning of the end for AJ really.

 

Fit and active I think he is a handful for most of the Top Ten ranked fighters of his era.

His amatuer record was impressive. 110 fights with only 5 losses. While I don't think he was robbed in the Parker fight, I can see a case for him winning. Battered an inform Joshua out of the ring then lost focus. Completely hypothetical but I think he would have exposed 'peak' Wilder in the late 2010's.

Inactivity was always his biggest problem.

 

I correctly predicted that this win would start to be hyped after I pointed out that this was Joshua's best win in SEVEN years:
https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/who-is-joshuas-best-win-since-povetkin-in-2018.733002/

You've gotta see the irony in Joshua fans deriding Fury for dethroning Klitschko without hardly taking a shot, calling it "awful, boring"

But Joshua does a jab and move job on a fat Ruiz who didn't even train and it's "SERIOUSLY UNDERRATED"

You guys are fans of a fighter, not of the sport.

 

I'd like some of it too. He totally schooled Ruiz.

 

Was his performance UNDERrated or......was Ruiz' performance OVERweight?

 

Massive, sweeping generalizations everywhere on this post.

 

It was a performance calculated with extreme care by his team which just saw their investment plummet significantly.
Let's remember he was about to 'conquer Murica' then got TKO'd by a fat man fill-in!
That was one of the most disastrous fights 'brand wise' you can think of.
People were saying Ruiz was going to KO'd him again in the rematch. That would have lost them untold millions.
So they did the safest thing they could, train him to point fight a fake obese HW with low power.
It was a cowardly performance from a 6'5 SHW with KO power who had every advantage out there.

Ruiz, who Sky/Matchroom pretended was some ultra-talent with incredible experience, went on to get dropped by a retired Arreola and beat an even older Ortiz who had no chin left after two Wilder fights. That's all he did since.

 

Many said that Joshua was incapable of such a performance. "Stiff, bodybuilder robot" is what he was called.
Definitely an underrated win for him.

And all of the idiots who claimed that the fatter Ruiz is, the better he is.

 

If Arreola was retired, then what does that make Ruiz? Arreola had not fought in 21 months, Ruiz in 17.
Then Ruiz took another 16 months off and faced Ortiz.
Followed by another 23 months off to face Miller.

Ruiz basically retired after the second Joshua fight, which is evident in his performances. He also has had to deal with injuries, and surgeries if I am not mistaken.

 

I tend to think it could've been his most effective style, would you tend to agree?

The bigger problem, I think, is he couldn't really combine styles or switch between them... And I think he was too proud and image focused to switch away from the big bad body building KO machine?

It wouldn't have been popular, or as entertaining, but if he'd committed to fighting that way regularly I think he'd have done better generally through the latter part of his career... I think he'd have done much better against Dubois that way for starters and possibly even won.

 

I myself think the Dubois loss as it happened, was a fluke. Not saying that Dubois would not have won, but that first round knockdown came off of a ridiculous punch. Credit to Dubois for landing it, but it completely changed the fight in his favor as Joshua was unable to recover.
Why I want to see a rematch is because Joshua has been trying to mix his style into what it was in the first and then the second Ruiz fights. He has been trying to do that for a while. Saw that in the Uysk fights as well.
So what if Joshua really has figured it out, or at least to some degree? I want to see that because I love watching boxers evolve.

 

I didn't see it as a convincing backfoot performance given the circumstances. When Buster Douglas turned up a stone overweight Holyfield splattered him in 3 rounds.

 

Hardly, the lump of lard that was ruiz couldn't move in there!

 

Professional media types reporting for a week on events on site, to we mere mortals, totally failed to communicate the appalling state Ruiz was in. I watched the debacle in a cinema, whose screen was barely big enough to contain the overspill of blubber from the hapless “challenger!”

 

Ruiz may have the best hand-speed at HW in the last 10-15 years and also a pretty good combination puncher. But you have a length advantage and can fight off the back foot, he's easy pickings. 44 year old Luis Ortiz whose legs were completely shot at that point won the majority of the rounds against him.