In light of the disaster that befell him this past Saturday night, former heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua needs to change things if he’s to be able to come again and get revenge over Andy Ruiz. So says heavyweight great Lennox Lewis – a fighter who knows all about coming back from a shock stoppage defeat. After being upset by huge underdog Oliver McCall back in 1994, Lewis ditched trainer Pepe Correa and began his long and enormously successful working relationship with the great Emanuel Steward; a trainer who brought the greatness out of Lewis.
Now Joshua needs to do a trainer switch himself, says Lennox. Speaking shortly after seeing Joshua get stopped by Ruiz in New York, Lewis said AJ needs to ditch long-time trainer Rob McCracken and get himself a new coach.
“You can’t go to university with your third grade teacher,” Lewis said as quoted by The Mail. “They won’t have the answers you need at that level. You need a professor by then. McCracken is A1 without question but maybe not fit for the style AJ needs to fight. I switched to Manny Steward who understood how to leverage all of my physical attributes and skills and showed me everything I needed to know for success. He [McCracken] may not be right for the type of style that AJ needs to master. Aside from that AJ was not prepared for anything Ruiz brought to the table.”
There is no word yet, at this early stage, on whether or not Joshua is even thinking about a change of trainers. It is of course always tempting for many a fighter to put the blame on the trainer when a bad loss occurs, and who knows, maybe Joshua will indeed look to do so and look to hire a new trainer. Certainly there are plenty of fine trainers out there who would almost certainly be willing to work with Joshua.
Judging by how badly he was beaten by Ruiz Joshua, who some say lost almost every round on Saturday night, needs to do something different if he is to beat him in the expected return fight. Maybe Lewis, who for a time trained another British heavyweight in David Price, is looking at working with AJ himself?
