It would be too simplistic – and unfair – to say Hrgovic won the fight purely through mind games, but the 34-year-old had succeeded in making the build-up uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
Hrgovic spent fight week repeatedly attacking Itauma’s age, dismissing him as “just a kid”. As the week wore on, Itauma looked increasingly irritated and eventually lost his composure at the weigh-in, shoving Hrgovic before the Croatian responded with a slap.<\/p>\n
Itauma prides himself on being unusually cerebral for a heavyweight. He reads psychology and self-help books, talks openly about sharpening his mind and appears to spend far more time analysing himself than most 21-year-olds.<\/p>\n
But there is always a danger that deep thinking becomes overthinking, something Anthony Joshua has been accused of repeatedly during the latter stages of his career.<\/p>\n
Whether the pre-fight barbs played any part or not, Itauma’s gameplan once the bell rang was clear; he wanted to end the night early.<\/p>\n
“Someone said to me he doesn’t feel like he’d win a world title unless he knocks him out. I didn’t like that,” Warren said.<\/p>\n
That mindset was understandable because it had served Itauma extraordinarily well until now. But perhaps Hrgovic had been underestimated by almost everybody – Itauma, the media, pundits, former fighters and bookmakers who installed the Briton as a heavy favourite.<\/p>\n
Hrgovic is an Olympic bronze medallist who went 12 hard rounds with the giant Zhilei Zhang, while against Daniel Dubois – the only defeat on his record – he was leading on two of the three scorecards before the fight was stopped because of cuts.<\/p>\n
‘El Animal’ knew what it felt like to be hurt, to become tired and to remain in a fight when things were going badly. Itauma did not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It would be too simplistic – and unfair – to say Hrgovic won the fight purely through mind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":876866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-876865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876865","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=876865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}