By Scott Gilfoid: 37-year-old journeyman Paul Butlin (14-19, 3 KO’s) is hoping to pull off an upset tonight when he faces 2012 British Olympic super heavyweight gold medalist in a scheduled 6 round fight on the undercard of the Kell Brook vs. Vyacheslav Senchenko card at the Motorpoint Arena, Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Butlin intends on taking the fight in close and hammering Joshua with head shots. Joshua is a decent fighter on the outside, but he has no inside game at all other than holding.
Butlin told IFLTV “He’s a big tall lad, long jab. So if I stay off him, which he’s hoping I’ll do, he’ll probably be able to take me out. So I’m just going to get into him. It’s a big one for me. I’ll ruin his party.”
Well, someone will eventually ruin Joshua’s party because he doesn’t have the power to dominate guys like other ex-Olympic gold medalists. Indeed, Audley Harrison breezed through his Olympic competition en route to winning a gold medal and showed better power than Joshua, but his career has gone nowhere. If Audley couldn’t do anything with his career, I don’t see Joshua being able to any better unless he can somehow find some power somewhere. He’s about to turn 24, and usually if a fighter doesn’t have power by that age then he’s never going to have it.
The 6’6″ Joshua would seem a pretty safe bet to win this fight as it’s a mismatch on paper. You can say the same thing for Brook in beating matched against Senchenko. It’s good basic careful match-making to make sure these guys don’t lose,which is why it takes a lot of the interest out of the fight card. But Butlin does have a decent chance of beating Joshua if he can take it to the inside and keep it there. Joshua absolutely needs distance to get his shots off. We saw what the Cuban Erislandy Savon was able to do to Joshua when nailing him in close in the Olympics. Savon was hammering Joshua at will with shots, and it was one of the most one-sided fights I’d seen in the 2012 Olympic competition in London, yet the judges gave Joshua the fight. I couldn’t understand the scoring because it looked looked Savon was hitting Joshua with the front part of his gloves in order to score points, but Joshua still got the nod.
Joshua could be a decent heavyweight if he took off some muscle and worked on his speed and power. Right now he’s too bulky and he seems to lack the explosiveness that you need to be a good heavyweight. Audley didn’t have Joshua’s muscles in coming out of the Olympics, but he could punch and move well. I guess it just shows you that having a lot of muscles doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a powerful puncher. The thing with Joshua is he could take all that useless muscle off easily with the right trainer and get down to a trim 220-224. Look at Deontay Wilder. He’s 6’7″, 224 lbs. with massive power, speed and agility. That’s what Joshua should be striving for.
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