stopped boxing novice Paul<\/a> when he failed to beat the count in the sixth round.<\/p>\n“Paul wasn’t in good shape, especially for a big heavyweight like that,” Lewis told Netflix.<\/p>\n
“After a couple rounds it showed, he was basically sitting there waiting to get hit.”<\/p>\n
The three-time world champion felt Joshua’s 15-month absence from the ring was the reason he failed to stop the YouTuber-turned-boxer earlier.<\/p>\n
The bout with Paul was his first action since his defeat against Daniel Dubois at Wembley Stadium in September 2024.<\/p>\n
“When Anthony said he’d been out for 15 months, it showed,” Lewis added.<\/p>\n
“He needed a couple of rounds to warm up and get used to the ring again before he threw those punches.<\/p>\n
“He did what he had to do. He had a guy in front of him running around the ring and he had to catch up with him.”<\/p>\n
Former super middleweight Andre Ward was less harsh on Paul’s initial performance.<\/p>\n
“When Paul got tired he panicked,” Ward said. “That’s a sign of fatigue. He helped Joshua out a little bit because he was having decent success early on. <\/p>\n
“You have to give Joshua that little bit of grace too, Jake Paul was good enough to make things interesting for a little while.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis has said Jake Paul “wasn’t in good shape” for his fight against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-201609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}