By Dan Ambrose: Andre Ward says Anthony Joshua’s loss to Oleksandr Usyk last Saturday night can be attributed to him coming up against a fighter that had too much ring intelligence for him to beat.
Ward notes that Joshua (24-3, 22 KOs) has gotten a lot of mileage out of having a rocket right hand, but that only carries you so far.
When you come up against fighters with boxing skills like Usyk (20-0, 13 KOs), it’s not enough to just have a big right hand. You need more than that to win against that level of competition.
Joshua still fought well against Usyk, losing by a 12 round split decision in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
If Joshua had been able to continue the momentum he had in rounds eight and nine, he would have won the championship rounds to get the victory. Joshua had Usyk hurt in the ninth round and looked like he was well on his way to winning the fight.
“There was too much IQ for Joshua. There’s no disrespect to Joshua. I can say that and still have respect for what Joshua did as an amateur and what he’s done as a pro,” said Andre Ward to Fight Hub TV.
“There’s no shade on Joshua, but it’s just the facts. You fight a certain kind of style for a long time and build up all that muscle, and you can look like an all-time great against certain guys.
“If you don’t work on your game and evolve, it’s the same stuff. He’s got an awesome right hand, and it comes off like a rocket, but you take him out of that element into deep waters and make him think, you see the mental fatigue that comes over him.
“He doesn’t know what to do sometimes, and then the body starts to fatigue, and then it goes from there. It had to. [Robert] Garcia wasn’t there before. I saw Joshua hitting to the body. He didn’t have perfect form, but he was hitting too the body.
“You saw him trying to hold his ground earlier in the fight and be the big man and play the role of the big man. It’s just hard to keep that going. People don’t get it.
“It’s funny that the style that gets disrespected the most. That’s the style that typically dominates. If Usyk fought the wrong kind of fight, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s a 50-50 situation.
“If you play to your strength, that’s a 70-30 situation. That style, you got to start respecting it more. Tyson Fury. It’s not an easy fight for either guy. It looks like we’re going to have our first undisputed champion sometime next year since Lennox Lewis.
“Usyk said, ‘I don’t want to fight nobody else.’ We knew Tyson Fury wasn’t going to retire. He wants to fight Usyk; it looks like,” said Ward.
