Exhausted AJ suffers power cut

IN the final 15 seconds, as he was caught between sagging ropes at his back and a blur of hard fists in front of his eyes, Anthony Joshua managed a smile. It was a smile of the damned if ever there was one.

He lost the fight, the second of his career, and the better part of £200million may have just gone with it.

It will sting all over. There will be the sting of the huge bruise under his right eye and the sting of that busted nose.

And there will be the sting of what else has disappeared, which in order can be listed as his treasured belts for the WBA, IBF, WBO and IBO world heavyweight titles, and then the small business of the big fight to which we have all given so much time in discussing.

Tyson Fury. Will it ever happen? And if it does, will it ever be what we wanted it to be? On the matter of the former, maybe it can. Maybe it will follow one of those redemptive story arcs, the culmination of revenge over Oleksandr Usyk in some far off date.

We have seen it before in this sport. There will always be a market for Joshua and Fury, just as there was a market for Manny Pacquiao and a market for Mike Tyson. They had their falls and they — we — still had their fights with Floyd Mayweather and Lennox Lewis.

But it was not the same. And if Joshua dusts himself off sufficiently, a fight with Fury will not be the same either. It was meant to go for £100m a pop, two fights. But it will take a lot to put Joshua together again after this most humbling of defeats against the brilliant force of Usyk, who won all the belts at cruiserweight and now holds all bar one in the land of the giants.

How he dominated this fight with his guile. With his tactical superiority, his movement, and his ability to launch that southpaw left into Joshua’s jaw. At times, watching Joshua trying to catch him, to pin him down, was something akin to watching a man trying to catch an eel between two sticks of butter. A question at this point about Joshua’s approach. How? Why?

For a time, we could see and appreciate progress and maturity in his conservative approach. He stayed back, he waited. Remember the first Andy Ruiz fight, to which Joshua succumbed through too many misadventures forward?

This looked progress — the restraining of instincts, the curbing of aggression. We saw it in the Ruiz rematch and we also saw added patience against Kubrat Pulev last time out.

So maybe we were seeing a continuation of his development, because that has always been a temptation in the Joshua story. To see it building to something through growing skills.

But maybe that was a blinkered look through British eyes. Maybe this fight was simply never in his favour. As it wore on, it looked less measured, l ess controlled. It became more desperate.

By the sixth he had barely landed a punch. By the eighth his nose was bleeding. By the 10th his left eye was almost closed and by the 11th even his 70,000 fans had stopped imploring him to change tack and attack. He would try and, barring the odd shot, he never came close.

In time we will wonder again how he might get on against Fury. But always there will be a doubt now, because if he could not get close to a slick moving genius up from cruiserweight, how can he be expected to out-dance a slick moving giant?

At the very least he has an awful lot to solve before we find out.