Anthony Joshua weighed 252.3 lbs, and IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois came in at 248.4 lbs at Friday’s weigh-in for their 12-round headliner this Saturday night at Wembley Stadium in London. Both fighters showed little emotion during the face-off, staring at each other with blank eyes that resembled two sharks ready for a meal.
The weight for the former two-time heavyweight champion Joshua (28-3, 25 KOs), who is always in the 250s, could be a bad thing if he gasses out if forced into a fast-paced fight by the youngster Dubois (21-2, 20 KOs).
It’s believed that Dubois will force Joshua into an all-out brawl from the opening bell, pushing his aging body to the limits. That might be too much for AJ, who has a lot of miles on the odometer and isn’t ready to fight in that manner.
If you were to create a fighter in a laboratory designed to defeat Joshua, you would end up with Dubois. Out of all the heavyweights in the division, Dubois is the perfect embodiment of a Joshua-destroying machine.
Joshua cannot afford to lose this fight, especially by knockout, because he’s coming off a four-fight, two-year rebuild job. He can’t do that again after a potentially devastating loss to Dubois on Saturday night. Joshua is quite wealthy, with a net worth of $80 million, expected to be boosted to $100 million after Saturday night’s take.
Losing to Dubois by humiliating knockout would likely ruin what’s left of Joshua’s sanity, sending him into a downward mental spiral that would make him unfit for future battles against the likes of Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk.
Going into a darkened isolation shed for four days won’t help Joshua if the superior battle-hardened Dubois blitzes him would be too much for AJ.
“I do. He has the personality where I don’t think that phases him,” said Ade Oladipo to Pro Boxing Fans when asked if Daniel Dubois can mentally handle this high-stress moment of fighting the star Anthony Joshua in front of a massive crowd of 96,000 fans on Saturday.
“There are some youngsters that can get on the pitch, and it’s the norm. There are others that it just kills them and swallows them [when dealing with stress]. I don’t know if that will phase Dubois because he has got that kind of personality of where his head is in the cloud sometimes. Maybe that’s a good thing for this.”
Dubois shows no emotion when he’s put under pressure. He’s like a seek-and-destroy android with the way he goes after his prey. For an aging fighter like Joshua to be going up against a guy like Dubois is bad news. Joshua is fine with guys like Otto Wallin and Francis Ngannou but not against an apex predator like Dubois.
“I don’t think it will phase him. He’ll walk out there and feel, ‘I belong here. I’m the champion. I went to Poland,” said Ade about Dubois.”I beat Miller. I beat Hrgovic. It’s my time,’ and you don’t know how you’re going to operate, and we don’t know until someone is in there. I think he will do okay.
“If he loses to Dubois, it’s going to be by knockout. This fight isn’t going on points. If AJ gets knocked out by Dubois, I think it’s a very difficult comeback. I wonder if AJ will want to come back. He’ll be 35 next month. I would wonder if he would want to go down to the Jermaine Franklin, Helenius, and Otto Wallin type. Do you want to build yourself back up again?” said Ade.
Joshua is too old and has too many miles on him for another four-fight rebuild to come back from a loss to Dubois on Saturday night. Although Joshua claimed he has “Loads” of time left in his career, he’ll change his mind if Dubois destroys him on Saturday night.
