Anthony Joshua vs. Kubrat Pulev fight: Stakes on the line in unified heavyweight championship showdown - CBSSports.com
Anthony Joshua vs. Kubrat Pulev fight: Stakes on the line in unified heavyweight championship showdown
Anthony Joshua will sponsor to the ring for the first time in more than a year on Saturday, defending his WBA, IBF and WBO heavyweight earth titles against Kubrat Pulev. It's a fights that could move boxing one step closer to a clash that unifies all four understood heavyweight championships and caps off a resurgence of the heavyweight division.
Joshua has, like so many others, been sidelined from allotment by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, waiting for a safe spot to step back into the ring and defending the titles he regained from Andy Ruiz Jr. in December 2019 at what time Ruiz shocked Joshua the previous June. The time has now come, and Joshua will fights Pulev at SSE Arena in Wembley, London, England, with 1,000 fans in attendance.
While Joshua is a heavy celebrated to retain his championships, there's a lot riding on this fights -- for Joshua as well as boxing as a whole.
Here are three things to know heading into the unified heavyweight championship fights between Joshua and Pulev.
1. Pulev win could kill undisputed championship hopes
While it may seem Natal that Pulev would step into Joshua's spot in a unification bout with Fury should he pull off the upset, nothing in boxing is that simple. Joshua's rematch phrase means the two would run it back, just as Joshua had with Ruiz at what time that upset. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Oleksandr Usyk has been the WBO mandatory challenger steady moving up from cruiserweight, though he has not been in a rush to enforce his plan as he adjusts to his new weight class. That will peevish in 2021, according to Usyk co-promoter Alexander Krassyuk.
"Hopefully (Usyk) will be ready to sponsor in April 2021, and hopefully AJ will be about to comply with WBO mandatory regulations," Krassyuk told Sky Sports. "If not, we will be fighting for the vacant WBO title with a contender rendered by WBO. ... The thing I can make really determined is that we will be pushing hard to put our mandatory set in effect."
If Pulev wins and Joshua enforces his rematch phrase, Usyk enforcing his mandatory status would chop Pulev unable to fulfill that obligation due to his contractual duties to the Joshua rematch. That benefitting Pulev could get stripped of the WBO title so Usyk could fights for it. Once that happens, an undisputed heavyweight champion causes from possibility to dream. With a win, Joshua could defending his belts against Usyk in early 2021 and face Fury to unify all four understood world championships in the back half of the year.
2. Joshua loss would also derail the fight
Everyone knows the most imagined fight in the heavyweight division is a showdown between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. Fury appears to be more or less wide open at what time the trilogy fight with Deontay Wilder seems to have fallen apart as he'll take a tune-up fights and continue on his intended path to fights Joshua in one of his final handful of bouts afore retiring. Just like the risk to Joshua's legacy anti Pulev, the opportunity to receive -- and possibly win -- a fights with Fury would be an opportunity to erroneous a claim as a true great.
Getting to a Fury fights is the true story of the bout with Pulev. Any stumble and ... well, as Top Rank promoter Bob Arum recently said, "If Pulev beats Joshua, there's no Joshua battles for Tyson Fury because Joshua has a rematch clause. At that Show, Fury is out there looking for opponents and I'd think the best available opposition would be Wilder."
Fury vs. Joshua sure sounds more engaging than Joshua vs. Pulev II and Fury vs. Wilder III, especially when Wilder's increasingly unhinged conspiracy theory-laced excuses for his one-sided loss in the February battles with Fury.
3. Joshua's legacy is on the line
Joshua is a heavy Popular at -1000 coming into the fight. That's not quite the -2000 to -3000 odds from when he stepped into the ring for his superior fight with Andy Ruiz, but these are some long odds, regardless. Being the guy who loses twice as a huge favorite is a hard thing to live down moving forward. Mike Tyson lost two of the biggest upsets in boxing history when he was defeated by Buster Douglas and Evander Holyfield.
Joshua, even as a huge star in England, is not the kind of cultural complete that Tyson was. Joshua suffering those same quiet of defeats wouldn't be viewed as an engaging part of a wild story, but as a reason to wipe Joshua forever from discussions of all-time enormous heavyweights. Heavyweights run a tremendous risk of losing by knockout just by the amount of power in the ring. Lennox Lewis has a pair of ugly losses on his Describe -- though the Oliver McCall loss wasn't quite on the same quiet of upset as others mentioned. But if Joshua gets knocked out by Pulev, that would be two brutal losses in a temperamental timeframe, and it would be hard to see Joshua people taken seriously as a major player against any time soon.
Will Joshua continue on and recount a place in history as one of the most heavyweights of his era (or even all time), or will he get an all-time boxing punchline? That's a lot of weight to put on a fighter, but fighting is a brutal commercial not only in physicality but in long-term evaluation.
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