Trainer Ben Davison admits responsibility for AJ’s humbling from Daniel Dubois
Ben Davison rose to fame after his work with Tyson Fury, transforming the overweight, inactive heavyweight into the fighting fit machine that took the fearsome Deontay Wilder to a draw in their first fight, when ‘The Bronze Bomber’ was well within his prime.
Most recently, Ben Davison teamed up with Anthony Joshua after the Brit opted to base his training camp in the UK instead of overseas in America with Derrick James.
Together, they dismantled tough Swede Otto Wallin in five rounds, then they destroyed Francis Ngannou in two.
However, in their third fight as a team, last Saturday night at Wembley, their partnership was found wanting as AJ was battered from start to finish by the powerful IBF World heavyweight champion Daniel Dubois.
Speaking at the post-fight press conference, Ben Davison said: “I’d just like to say that me and my team have received a hell of a lot of credit for good performances that he’s had, so it’s important that we take responsibility for the bad performance as well. So we’re willing to do that.”
Davison spoke in more depth about what actually happened inside the right, and admitted that Joshua just was never able to implement the gameplan in what turned out to be a wild night of heavyweight action.
“We knew Dubois, he returns all the time when you jab, so that was something we were looking to capitalise on. For whatever reason, things didn’t get going as we’d have liked to in the early part of the fight. That was just one of the things we was looking to pick up on – obviously there was a few other things as well. But just didn’t manage to get the things we was looking to get going, going early.
“A couple of things we were looking to capitalise on, like Eddie said at the end, there was a couple of very very very short spells of it, one of those was when he managed to land that right hand, there was a couple of things we wanted to do to follow up moments like that, and just didn’t apply it the way we’d prepared to unfortunately. But by that point a lot had gone on, he’s not thinking straight, very difficult pill to swallow.”
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