MIAMI – Anthony Joshua was unhappy with his showing during his sixth round stoppage of Jake Paul at Miami’s Kaseya Center but made his intentions clear: He wants Tyson Fury next and he doesn’t want to wait around for the former champion who is notorious for changing his mind.
Joshua was expected to deal with the the YouTuber-turned-boxer Paul with relative ease, with many debating how many seconds it would last, not rounds. Paul, 12-2 (7 KOs), was either on his bike or scrambling around on the canvas for large parts of the contest but did manage to survive five-and-a-half sessions with Joshua before meeting his end.
Midway through the sixth, after already having his man down twice, Joshua planted a hard right hand into Paul’s face that broke his jaw in two places. Though the finish was cold and clinical, what came before was far from vintage “AJ”.
“I needed to do better. It's a win, but it's not a success,” Joshua, 29-4 (26 KOs), said of the fight. “I think my coach expects more from me and I expect more from myself. But what can we do? We can't reverse the clocks. I have to move forward. I have to put that in the past now. After today, you may see a bit of social media trying to lap up all of the algorithm attention. But for me, it's in the past. I can't live off of that win. I've got a lot of improvement I need to do. So yeah, I'm not happy.”
Paul, who spoke a good game all week but in the end seemingly had no intention of winning the fight, had demanded a larger ring (22 square feet) with his fleet-footed tactics in mind. In turn, Joshua struggled to cut off the ring.
“Jake decided to move around the ring and I decided to put the pressure on,” Joshua said. “What I could have done better is a lot of things. 100 per cent. In the fight game, you've seen the amazing fighters that have graced us over the last 100 years, and the expectations that we put on ourselves are immense, but I tried my best.”
It seemed Joshua’s presence in the ring not only drained Paul physically, but also mentally, something Joshua had predicted early in the build up.
“Jake done well while it lasted, but if you remember what I said in the interview, fighting is not just physical, it's psychological,” Joshua said. “And when you understand the psychological warfare, what I did say is that, ‘Jake what's gonna happen? I'm gonna see a time when I'm gonna take your soul and you're either gonna give up or you're gonna get knocked out.’ And unless you have that instinct, you just will never be a good fighter.
“So I wish that I could have knocked him out at the start, but as we saw tonight Jake has spirit. He has some heart. He tried his best and I take my hat off to him because, number one, a lot of fighters haven't got in the ring with me and Jake did. And secondly, even when he got knocked down, he kept on trying to get up and I take my hat off to him. So America, I think you have someone who could potentially, if he still has the heart for it, come back again, dust the dirt off his shoulder, and come again and maybe sell out this [Kaseya] Center sometime in 2026. Maybe against a Gervonta Davis, a Ryan Garcia, who knows?”
Talk immediately turned to what’s next for Joshua and one man dominated the conversation: Tyson Fury. “I'll give the Dosser eight weeks,” Joshua joked. “24 hours to sign a contract. Let's see if he's a man. AJ right here. Greedy belly.”
“We can do that straight away. No interim fights,” promoter Eddie Hearn added. “If Tyson's ready and AJ's ready, we don't have to fight in February or March. I think he's saying he needs to fight.”
