JOSHUA DREAM LEFT IN TATTERS

Underdog Usyk scuppers hope of Fury fight with emphatic win

THEY had risen up out of Seven Sisters tube station in a steady stream and sauntered abreast in groups through the vibrant hum of the Tottenham High Road. The fans were young white men in the main, dressed in an informal uniform of collared shirts, dark jeans and smart, new pumps, and they had a swagger about them as they headed north in the early evening, as if the fight they were here to watch was already filling them up with bravado.

They walked past the Afro-Caribbean food markets and the convenience stores and the nail salons and the Tesco and the McDonald’s and the kebab shops and the Polish supermarket, past a smart brick building called The Trampery, ‘a home for Tottenham’s entrepreneurs’ and past an ‘old-school boozer’ called The Bluecoats. Music blared from in there, mixed with the kind of shouts and yells that said it was getting close to fight time.

And when darkness began to fall, they headed away for the looming grey hulk of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the lavish new palace of entertainment that is the new high water-mark for luxury and design in sports venues. And there, just before 10pm, Anthony Joshua, who confessed happily to enjoying a brawl or two on the High Road in his youth, long before he earned his fame and his fortune, came among them.

Joshua and other young boxers from Finchley used to head over to Tottenham to frequent the Opera House pub on the High Road and stare down all-comers. Some things have changed. Some have not. He is a multi-millionaire now, a successful businessman as well as a feared fighter but as he climbed through the ropes last night, he was still engaged in struggle, still confronted by danger, still trying to fend off challengers.

A couple of hours before Joshua fought last night, Callum Smith knocked out his light-heavyweight opponent, Lenin Castillo, with such force that Castillo hit the canvas and lay there, his knees twitching. He was carried from the ring on a stretcher. The brilliant boxing writer, Donald McRae, called it a ‘dark trade’ for a reason. No amount of purse money can change the fact that danger is still Joshua’s milieu. He was about to discover that again in the most brutal fashion.

In fact, Joshua’s return to his old stomping ground ended in the kind of setback from which he will find it hard to rebound.

The fight’s final seconds felt like a scene from Raging Bull as Oleskandr Usyk pummelled Joshua with punch after punch. Joshua refused to go down in an echo of Jake La Motta’s boast to Sugar Ray Robinson: ‘You never put me down, Ray.’

He never put him down but Usyk had schooled him. Joshua’s battered, swollen face told that story. So did the judges’ scorecards. All three scored it to Usyk.

This was Joshua’s 26th fight and Usyk, the man who was once the undisputed ruler of the cruiserweight division, is the toughest opponent Joshua, the holder of the

WBA, WBO and IBF versions of the title, has ever faced. That seems disrespectful to Wladimir Klitschko, who Joshua knocked out in 2017,

but Klitschko was 41. Usyk is 34. Some said with great prescience that Usyk, from Ukraine, would be the man to defrock Joshua, 31, once and for all and to ruin all those longheld dreams of a £200million world heavyweight title unification fight with Tyson Fury, a fight that has slipped through his grasp for years now as Fury’s reputation has grown and Joshua’s has somehow been allowed to suffer in comparison.

Usyk lived up to his billing as a supremely skilled technical boxer, an elusive southpaw, who many felt would expose his opponent's shortcomings. Joshua has been portrayed by some, particularly Fury fans, as a robotic fighter incapable of adapting. Those critics might well have felt vindicated last night.

That feeling had gained some traction from the memories of Joshua’s solitary professional defeat, to Andy Ruiz Jr at Madison Square Garden two years ago when he seemed unable to cope with the movement and hand speed of a smaller man. Joshua’s detractors, and other analysts, pointed to all those factors as reasons why this was his toughest assignment.

In that sense, it was also seen as a gauge as to how Joshua might fare against Fury. Again, that fight has been characterised in its many imaginings as a battle between Joshua’s brute force and the greater guile of Fury. After what happened here last night, Fury-Joshua will probably never take place.

How strange it seems now that Joshua was the picture of calm as he walked to the ring. When the fight started, Joshua’s nonchalance disappeared. The fight exploded into life in the third round when Usyk caught Joshua flush on the jaw with a slamming left hook that shook the champion. In the fourth, Usyk rocked Joshua’s head back again with a stiff right jab. Usyk’s movement was more dynamic and Joshua’s jab lacked conviction.

There were traces in Joshua’s countenance of the bewildered look he wore during his defeat to Ruiz in New York but he did rock Usyk back on his heels with a solid straight right in the sixth.

By the end of the eighth, it had started to feel Joshua was being outclassed. Joshua desperately tried to unload his right hand but in the 11th, it was Usyk who caught him again and again with the left.