Promoter Eddie Hearn predicts an early exit for IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois if he comes out firing with both barrels against Anthony Joshua on September 21st in their headliner at what is expected to be a jam-packed Wembley Stadium in London.
Hearn is convinced that Joshua, 34, will blast out Dubois if he fights like he did in his recent clash against Matchroom fighter Filip Hrgovic on June 1st in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Dubois decimated Hearn’s fighter Hrgovic, knocking him out in the eighth round and spoiling his plans to match him against AJ for the IBF title.
It is obviously a bitter pill for Hearn to swallow watching Dubois wreck Hrgovic, and you have to wonder if there are still some hard feelings over what Daniel did to his fighter. All that money and planning went down the drain with nothing to show for it.
Now, Dubois is poised to do the same thing to Joshua (28-3, 25 KOs) on September 21st, which would be a harder thing to deal with for Hearn watching AJ’s ship sinking into the abyss.
Of course, with His Excellency Turki Alalshikh letting Joshua know that he can still get the Tyson Fury fight in early 2025, even if he gets beat, it won’t be the end of the world if Dubois sinks him to the bottom of the ocean.
Still, the cash that the Joshua-Fury fight pulls in won’t be nearly as much if Dubois knocks out Joshua because fans aren’t going to be eager to pour their hard-earned money into watching a pampered, spoiled-rotten AJ back his way into the match under those circumstances. In the real world, winners get the spoils, not the losers.
“If [Daniel] Dubois comes out like he did in the [Filip] Hrgovic fight, Dubois could get flattened early. I think he’ll get flattened, but Dubois is dangerous,” said promoter Eddie Hearn to DAZN on his prediction that Anthony Joshua will knockout IBF heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois on September 21st if he comes out of the gates aggressively.
I hate to break this to Hearn but he’s got it dead wrong about Dubois. If he comes into the fight with Joshua fighting like a locomotive at full steam, he’s going to wear him down quickly and score a fast knockout. Joshua can’t take the kind of shots that Hrgovic did, and he’s incapable of handling the fast-paced fight that Dubois routinely puts on.
“You don’t want to be trading with Daniel Dubois, [instead] you want accuracy, you want power, you want explosiveness, and you want to time him onto shots,” said Hearn.
Joshua isn’t going to be able to potshot against Dubois like he did against the novice Francis Ngannous last March because he’s not going to hang back or fight stupidly the way that guy, changing stances like he has no sense.
Dubois will jump on Joshua from the get-go, blasting him with power shots and making him feel his age. It could end badly for Joshua, with him getting knocked out and his career in a bad spot afterward.
