Anthony Joshua cleared his final hurdle in the ring, before he fights Tyson Fury in November, but he was knocked down twice, shockingly, in the first round of his wild and chaotic bout with Kristian Prenga. In the early hours of Sunday morning in Jeddah, a devastating knockout in the second left Prenga crumpled in a heap on the canvas, wrapped up in the ropes, and rescued Joshua from humiliation.
After the opening three minutes his extravaganza with Fury looked as if it was about to end in abject ruins but Joshua pulled himself out of a dark pit streaked with defeat to salvage his career – and his much-hyped fight with his British compatriot. This was a crazy firefight of a tune-up for Joshua, who was boxing for the first time since being injured in the car accident that took the lives of two of his closest friends, Sina Ghami and Latif Ayodele, last December.
“He’s back” was emblazoned on the big screen behind the figure of Joshua as he walked at a steady, even sombre pace towards the ring. A booming Meek Mill track echoed around him while the faces of Ghami and Ayodele briefly filled the screen. Wearing a camouflage top and trunks, he then turned and quietly greeted Oleksandr Usyk, a new ally sat at ringside.
Joshua had trained hard with Usyk and his team in the buildup to his arrival in Jeddah. Usyk remains the best heavyweight in the world and Joshua, having lost both his battles with the Ukrainian, had resolved with some humility that he needed to learn from his previous rival. With Usyk’s trainers in his corner, and coming into the ring lighter than he has been for years at 251lb, Joshua was apparently determined to resemble a much sharper and sleeker fighter against Prenga.
After a fleeting prayer in his corner, Joshua stepped towards the centre of the ring and, within 20 seconds, the unheralded Prenga had floored him heavily with a crunching right uppercut. Joshua got up quickly, looking dazed. Halfway through the round, with his legs still unsteady, Joshua was rocking against the ropes. With 30 seconds left in the first Joshua was down again. He hauled himself up, shaking his head, with defeat closing in on him. It had been a disastrous round but Joshua fired back just before the bell.
Fury must have been cursing as the biggest money-making contest in the history of British boxing looked on the brink of obliteration. But, Joshua came out in the second with real purpose and quickly hurt the strangely tentative Albanian, who was already backing away before the damaging punches landed. It was almost as if Prenga could not believe he had come so close to knocking out the feted former world champion.
With 20 seconds left in the round, a jolting jab set up Joshua as he landed two heavy right hands. Sensing a seismic turnaround, Joshua unleashed a pulverising right which landed with brutal force and separated Prenga from his suddenly scrambled senses. It was immediately obvious that he would be counted out.
Joshua celebrated exuberantly, climbing on the ropes and raising his hands in jubilation, but it was more telling to see how a shaken Usyk just drew in a deep breath of relief.
A bizarrely uneven victory followed Fury’s contrastingly routine defeat of Mariusz Wach, a faded Polish journeyman, in Pattaya, Thailand, on Friday night. Fury dominated a one-sided scrap before Wach was rescued by his team after they decided he could not come out for the eighth round.
Earlier in the week Fury had insisted that he would reject an invitation to fly to Saudi Arabia from Thailand to watch Joshua. He had even expressed doubts that his much-delayed battle with Joshua would ever happen and described his fellow British heavyweight as “a bottle-job flapper and a chinless wonder”. But it helps that he and and Joshua could each make close to $100m for a contest that should have happened eight years ago, when they were both close to their fighting prime. So it seems highly likely that they will meet in the ring later this year.
“Hold on, wait a minute,” Joshua cried out when he was interviewed in the ring. “Have we got Tyson Fury in the room? Is he here or not?”
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When he was informed that Fury would not be joining him between the ropes, Joshua slipped into his best high-pitched whispery impersonation of Mike Tyson at his most unhinged as, jokingly, he said: “I am the meanest, most ruthless, most vicious champion. Nobody can stop me. He is no Alexander [the Great].” He also referenced Tyson’s claim that he would “eat the heart” of Lennox Lewis but it was all just a madhouse riff from Joshua as he delighted in his comeback.
“All jokes aside, there are two sides,” he continued. “One is the fighter and the other is respect. I respect everything [Fury] has done and everything that he has achieved, but as a fighting person, we’re here now. I hope the fans will be in for a lovely treat.”
The Fury-Joshua circus has been rolling for so many years that even the most optimistic members of boxing’s beleaguered fanbase have sometimes wondered if the two ex-world champions would ever fight each other. But, finally, as Joshua turned the prospect of a terrible defeat into a knockout win over Prenga, the shenanigans moved significantly closer to becoming a real showdown later this year.
