He sees the profitable clash with Paul as preparation for a possible confrontation with Tyson Fury next year.<\/p>\n
Paul has constructed his boxing resume by battling former MMA fighters, with his only significant adversary, Tommy Fury, handing the social media personality his single defeat in 2023.<\/p>\n
Paul challenged Joshua on his podcast in March, declaring: “I want to fight Anthony Joshua because I know I will f—— beat Anthony Joshua’s a–. He doesn’t have a chin, and he has no skill, and he is stiff. I love you, Anthony, and we are friends. But I want to fight you.”<\/p>\n
However, the American from Cleveland, Ohio, has competed just once in the heavyweight category. That occurred when he faced 58 year old Mike Tyson.<\/p>\n
Paul dropped down to cruiserweight for his victory over Julio Cesar Chavez Jr in June, tipping the scales at 199.4 pounds. He tipped the scales at a career-high 227.2 pounds during his bout with Tyson.<\/p>\n
In stark contrast, Joshua weighed in at 252.5 pounds when he suffered defeat to Dubois last year – providing him with a substantial size edge unless Paul bulks up significantly in the upcoming weeks.<\/p>\n
Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn revealed this week that the former champion might even compete on an undercard this year just to return to action – but he will now instead headline against Paul.<\/p>\n
“We will make a decision this week on Anthony’s next fight,” he stated.<\/p>\n
“If he fights this year, it’s just gonna be a… You probably won’t even hear about it, unless it’s Jake Paul. We’ll make that decision this week, but – outside of Jake Paul – if he fought this year, you really wouldn’t know about it.”<\/p>\n
Paul’s business partner, Nakisa Bidarian, commented in August: “This would be pursued as a straight-up professional fight. I think there’s certainly an experience gap between the two of them in terms of where they’re at in their career.<\/p>\n
“From my prospective, Joshua’s an active heavyweight. The likelihood of Anthony Joshua being able to land a heavyweight punch is much higher than what Mike Tyson had. I want to give Jake as much time as possible to improve on his boxing skillset to be able to effectively neutralise that main attribute of Anthony Joshua.<\/p>\n
“My ask of him is to wait longer to do it. But when an opportunity is there, sometimes if you don’t take it, it never comes back.”<\/p>\n
While Joshua has previously labeled Paul “good for boxing” and added: “He has no amateur background and just jumped straight in. He’s learning under pressure, and that will help him evolve quickly.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He sees the profitable clash with Paul as preparation for a possible confrontation with Tyson Fury next year.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279086,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[5276,703,8207,49,48,127252,5277,127251,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-279085","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-anthony-joshua","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-boxing-section","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-gervonta-davis-accusations","14":"tag-jake-paul","15":"tag-netflix-boxing-fight","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279085\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}