Rewatched Parker Ruiz and Parker AJ

Agree with most of that but I think Ruiz does him again. It’s a really bad style for him imo.

 

Parker can fight on the backfoot, and laterally, but the bodybuilder can't. Will be interesting to how Joshua approaches the rematch. He's not use to fighters taking his best shots.

 

Pretty much how I saw it. Regardless of the ref I don't think Parker would have been able/willing to commit to staying in the pocket and walking Joshua down. For much of the fight with Whyte it was Parker himself who was getting mauled, and I don't see his style as an analog of Ruiz in that respect.

Unless Joshua is physically and mentally shattered by the Ruiz loss, I don't think he's quite the sitting duck some are making him out to be. He may well have been overrated by a lot of us, but I don't think there's a need to go through his record and apply retrospective asterisks to every meaningful win. He's beaten 3 of the current top 10, and the other big win on his record was clearly top 5 at the time (although well past his prime). He was on a good run, beat some good guys, and then ran into someone who was all wrong for him. He may bounce back, but even if he doesn't it doesn't invalidate what he has achieved to date.

 

Whyte was a domestic level fighter at the time.

 

He probably still is to be fair. Not sure he does Joyce or Dubois. The likes of Pulev, Ortiz he has swerved. Kabayel would be a good test for him. I don’t see him getting near Joshua and certainly not the other two.

 

whyteleafe was a fat novice at the time and had one working arm during that fight.. nowhere close to the same guy who went life and death with shot old delboy for 23 rounds

 

I’m getting a little bit frustrated listening to what I perceive to be a sense of entitlement from Whyte. Part of me wants Rivas to give him a torrid taste of reality next month although I hope he gets the win eventually.

 

The clash of heads may well have been a factor, and it happened so early in the fight that it's difficult to say how the fight would have panned out if it hadn't happened. **** happens in a fight though, and we should put more stock in what actually did happen rather than putting an asterisk next to anything we don't like the look of. The observations that Parker wasn't able to rough up Joshua, and that Parker was roughed up by Whyte, are more relevant to the discussion of Parker's chances of roughing up Joshua than any What If scenario based on speculation.

When Shane Mosley lost to Vernon Forrest, most people put it down to a 2nd round headbutt shortly before he was knocked down, and expected him to put it right in the rematch. He lost the rematch clearly as well without the headbutt.

 

What conspiracy theories ?

 

Some crackpots are suggesting big iosh has a chin.

 

The Parker win always had an asterisk by it for me.
I've always give Joshua credit for boxing pretty well in that fight. But the referee clearly narrowed Parker's chances down with his actions. He literally stopped them fighting on more than one occasion. Everybody on all sides after the fight agreed the referee was ridiculous.
There were moments where Parker was conceivably about to have Joshua in trouble (and the reverse may be true too) and the referee stopped it.
Joshua was at the advantage at long range where the referee forced the fight to take place.

 

Ref paid off. He was bad but come on be real.

 

The ref was indeed a cartoon character, and shut down any attempts to fight in close. I felt that the incompetence was pretty evenly spread though; it wasn't like a Reid-Ottke scenario where one fighter was stopped from fighting and the other was given free rein.

I didn't see anything in the fight that suggested that with more in-fighting Parker would have been able to bulldoze Joshua. Parker seemed wary of committing through the fight, in stark contrast to Ruiz who was willing to walk through Joshua's punches. With his apparent advantage in handspeed, Parker had opportunities at range in the same way Povetkin did. The ref took away a potential dimension to the fight, but Joshua adapted better to what was left and deserves credit for the W.