Why Tyson Fury will laugh at idea of fighting Anthony Joshua

The golden goose of British boxing is starting to look suspiciously like a lame duck. “New dawn” was how Anthony Joshua’s carefully-scripted comeback against Jermaine Franklin, a little-known American who until last year was working in a Michigan wool factory, had been billed. But it seemed, on this evidence, as if his career was entering the first embers of dusk.

A ragged, fractious points victory was hardly the bolt of electricity Joshua had been hoping to send through the heavyweight division. It was not that he floundered against Franklin, merely that, at 33, he just looked leaden, as if age and self-doubt were attenuating his powers. A unanimous win on the cards was by no means a disgrace, especially given Franklin’s resilience. But for somebody of Joshua’s calibre, a former two-time heavyweight champion of the world, it was deeply underwhelming.

Even Eddie Hearn, a man who could sell an igloo to a tribe of Inuit, was hard pushed to extol the aesthetic virtues of this spectacle. “Solid, not spectacular,” was the promoter’s verdict. “He won’t be over the moon.” Most had predicted that Joshua would wrap this up within half the allotted 12 rounds or fewer. But in a reflection of his fading force, he had to wait for the judges to confirm his win.

It was an ill-tempered, frustrating evening for Joshua, summed up in the seconds after the final bell, when he became embroiled in a melee in Franklin’s corner, exasperated by repeated holding in the 12th round. Even a retired Tony Bellew leapt into the fray. Then again, Bellew is such an unabashed Joshua loyalist that he had the favourite winning all of the first seven rounds, despite a largely even early contest.

In the aftermath, Hearn was still talking up the prospect of an all-British blockbuster between Joshua and Tyson Fury. As it stands, Fury could be forgiven for laughing uproariously at the idea. Here Joshua toiled to subdue an opponent who was giving up four inches in height and five inches in reach. The notion that he could seriously trouble the most awkward, slippery, defensively skilled heavyweight on the planet appears remote to the point of absurdity. Even Dillian Whyte, expected to be Joshua’s next adversary later this year, will be relishing the chance.

Still, Joshua persisted in his now-familiar ritual of claiming that Fury was on his radar next. Asked who he would prefer out of Fury and Whyte, he replied: “100 per cent Tyson Fury. That’s the pot of gold. He’s the WBC champion of the world. That’s what it’s about.” Indeed it is, although it is difficult to shake the sense that this particular ship has sailed. The time for making this particular fight was two years ago, when both men were at their zenith. Now, there is little sign in Joshua’s boxing of anything to trouble his larger, louder compatriot.

The capacity crowd inside the O2 Arena indicated that while Joshua’s prestige in this most gilded division had dipped, his popularity remained as reliable as ever. Still, he faced so many imponderables. What would count as success? Did he have the appetite to rebuild his reputation at the age of 33? He did at least answer the second question in the affirmative, reflecting: “It’s good to be back in the ring. I’m climbing the ladder. But deep down, I’m not happy, because the ultimate goal was the knockout.”

It felt an aeon since Joshua had fought in a mere arena on home soil. Aside from his pandemic-enforced bout with Kubrat Pulev in 2020, he had gone six years without competing indoors in front of a British crowd. But his lustre as a surefire stadium draw has dimmed in the wake of back-to-back defeats to Oleksandr Usyk. He did not even have Michael Buffer as his master of ceremonies this time.

He towered over Franklin as the two squared up, not hesitating to impose his alpha-male status. Restrained in his opening round, he doubled up with his jab whenever possible, unconcerned even as his trusty right hand too often fell short. A little blood emerged on his nose early in the second, but he was unperturbed, not least when he detonated his first shot to the head.

The pattern shifted in the third, with Franklin discovering a surer footing and a more visible confidence. Whenever Joshua let fly, the underdog returned with interest. This was not the type of imperious performance he had delivered on this Greenwich stage in his younger days, dispatching all-comers with early-round wipe-outs. He appeared hesitant, unaccustomed not to be headlining a world title fight for once, drawn into grappling and defending as Franklin flew forward in the fourth.

Joshua desperately needed an injection of pace, an ignition point for his heavy artillery. But it was slow in coming, with Franklin adeptly countering every time he let his fists fly. “Lead with the right hand,” Bellew pleaded from ringside. Finally Joshua strung together the sequences in the eighth, bombarding Joshua at will. For the first time, he seemed the more organised fighter, the return to first principles at his training base in Dallas paying dividends.

He just needed the statement flourish, a way to convince his detractors that he had not lost his edge. The problem was that whatever he tried, Franklin responded with a chin of iron. Trading punches on the ropes at the close of the tenth, 20,000 fans implored him to produce the coup de grace. Alas, it never arrived.

For a long time, the Joshua dichotomy has been that for all his slick corporate appeal, he has sometimes seemed to lack the requisite ferocity and endurance at this level. It is a contradiction he has been anxious to correct, taking himself off to Texas to submit to a camp of intense self-denial and self-discipline under trainer Derrick James.

Franklin had highlighted how Joshua seemed to struggle against smaller fighters, recalling his humiliation at the hands of the diminutive, borderline corpulent Andy Ruiz Jnr in 2018. He calculated that with an astute strategy, he could unsettle the overwhelming favourite.

It was not to be in the end, but he did succeed in showing how far Joshua had fallen from the peaks of old. Once, Joshua regarded a date with Fury as his fate. Today, it resembles a flight of purest fancy.