Though his cool and calm demeanour hides it very well, heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua is still angry over the whole Jarrell Miller thing – you know, where the man known as Big Baby failed not one, not two, but a shocking three drugs tests, this forcing the scrapping of the June 1st fight. Joshua, a real pro, always keeps things optimistic, as he said when speaking with IFL TV yesterday.
And though he is now fully focused on his fight with replacement foe Andy Ruiz Jr (a man some people say will give A.J a tougher fight than Miller would have done), Joshua is still thinking about Miller. Joshua actually stated how he would have still gone ahead with the Miller fight on June 1; PEDs and all. And the reigning WBA/IBF/WBO champ says he would still have beaten the New Yorker.
“I would have fought Miller on PEDs,” Joshua told IFL TV. “It’s a fight at the end of the day, it is what it is. No issue. What Miller chooses to do or the governing body chooses to do is nothing to do with me, as long as I can crack on and do my job. I don’t think he could have beat me on PEDs anyway. It would have been a good fight, a tough fight. I was looking forward to punishing Miller.”
A.J added how if the Miller fight somehow gets rearranged he would take it. Still, will Miller ever get the big chance again? Should he? Plenty of people go as far as to say all drugs cheats should be banned for life; or at the very least for a longer time than the seemingly standard six-months ban that is enforced when a fighter tests positive for an illegal substance (or two, or three).
Joshua has always been clean and credit to him for not, as he put it himself, kicking a man when he’s down. Even if, in the opinion of some, Miller is deserving of no such display of sportsmanship from a man he was fully prepared to cheat against in an effort to beat him.
Now let’s all hope nothing untoward happens with the Ruiz match; either before, during or after the fight.
