By Scott Gilfoid: Dillian Whyte (16-1, 13 KOs) see the Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs) vs. IBF heavyweight champion Charles Martin (23-0-1, 21 KOs) fight as an even toss-up fight in their clash on April 9 at the O2 Arena in London, UK. Whyte is hoping to face the winner of the Martin-Joshua fight in 2017. Whyte recently had surgery to repair his injured left shoulder, and he currently is rehabbing the shoulder.
Whyte was stopped in the 7th round by Joshua last December at the O2 in a fight in which Whyte injured his left shoulder after hurting Joshua. Whyte came into the fight with an injured left shoulder, but he made things worse after putting everything he had in a shot to Joshua’s head.
Whyte thinks that Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn only picked the 6’5” Martin because they felt he was the softest target of the heavyweight champions. He doesn’t think that they would have put Joshua in with the likes of heavyweight champions Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder because those guys would have been a real threat to beating Joshua.
This is potentially a really difficult fight for the 6’6” Joshua because Martin is roughly the same size as him with equal punching power for the most part. Joshua might have a little more power than Martin, but not much more. Further, Martin is a southpaw and he’s going to be a difficult style for Joshua to deal with. But more importantly, Martin has great stamina and a high work rate. This could prove to be fatal for Joshua, who is a four-round fighter at best, and who looked gassed after two rounds in his last fight against Whyte.
“They wouldn’t have taken the fight with Deontay Wilder or Tyson Fury. In their mind, Martin is the weakest of the world champions,” Whyte said to skysports.com. “We’ll see. Martin is a big guy, 6ft 5in and a southpaw. He packs a punch but he’s also untested at the top. His biggest fight was against Vyacheslav Glazkov and Glazkov got injured early in the fight. There’s still a lot that’s not known about him.”
It’s true that we won’t know much about Martin, but we know even less about Joshua because he’s faced worse opposition than Martin. The size of Martin is going to be a real nightmare for Joshua because he’s going to need to deal with getting hit back in this fight.
If you look at the guys that Joshua has fought since he turned pro, he looked uncomfortable when the fighters actually had the sense enough to throw punches instead of just standing there and looking silly like punching bags. Martin isn’t a slow fighter mentally, so he’s going to be throwing punches instead of just hanging on the ropes waiting to get banged out.
Build. Destroy. Rebuild. #AJBoxing pic.twitter.com/hM1aEAvIre
— Anthony Joshua (@anthonyfjoshua) February 17, 2016
“I think it’s a 50-50 fight because both of them are around the same level,” said Whyte. “They seem to have the same KO ratio. Charles is a southpaw and like I’ve said from day one, Joshua doesn’t see punches coming from his right side.”
Well, if Joshua just charges Martin like he does all of his opponents, then this fight could end quickly with Joshua flopping around on the canvas after gassing out and getting knocked out. I think Martin will take Joshua out the same way he did against Glazkov last January in stopping him in the third round.
I just hope Joshua doesn’t go football on us and lower his head to crash his 245lb frame into Martin to drop him by bumping rather than by throwing punches. That would be a tragedy if Martin gets hurt from being bumped. I saw Joshua bumping into Whyte last December, and I wonder if Whyte got hurt from that rather than him just throwing out his shoulder.
I think Martin has got the better skills and better pure punching ability. He doesn’t have all that muscle slowing him down like Joshua does. Martin is just a punching machine. He shows clearly that the body doesn’t need tons of muscles in order throw punches. I think Martin would be a terrible fighter if he had 20 to 30 pounds of excess muscle on his frame slowing him down in his fights.
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