Eddie Hearn has criticised Anthony Joshua for not temporarily stopping his fight with Daniel Dubois after taking a low blow.
Dubois delivered a dominant display at Wembley on Saturday night as he dismantled Joshua in just five rounds in front of 96,000 fans.
Joshua was knocked to the canvas in all but one of the five rounds, while Dubois finished the fight with a crunching right counter which left the 34-year-old in a heap and unable to stand.
However, there was a brief halt to the fight in the penultimate round after Dubois caught Joshua with a low blow.
Referee Marcus McDonnell immediately stepped in to stop the bout with just over 90 seconds of the round remaining and issued a warning to Dubois over his punch.
Boxing rules allow a fighter to take up to five minutes to recover from a low blow, however, Joshua did not offer any sort of protest as McDonnell then signalled for the contest to continue.
Hearn believes Joshua showed ‘inexperience’ in that moment but believes his decision not to temporarily halt the fight showed that his fighter had the right spirit.
‘People always question people’s heart, even the last knockout he’s scrambling to get up, he couldn’t have tried another inch and that’s all you can give to people,’ Hearn said after Joshua’s defeat.
‘I think when you do that you can look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I might not have been good enough tonight but I’ve tried my nuts off and I gave everything’.
‘I spoke to him last night and he said, ‘I’m ready to go in the trenches tomorrow night’, he went all the way in the trenches.
‘People talk about him taking the knee, spitting a gumshield out, listen, when Daniel Dubois hit him in the nuts in the third or fourth round, I’m screaming at AJ to take the full five minutes.
‘That’s actually a little bit of inexperience [from Joshua]. At that point when he couldn’t stand up, he’s been hit full blown in the conkers, all he’s got to do to the ref is [say] but that’s not him.
‘He just went to the ref, ‘I’m fine, come on, let’s go’. I’m like, ‘no, no, what are you doing?’. And then it happened again because he just came to fight tonight.
‘When you talk about entertainment, maybe vulnerability, but also a huge puncher who’s prepared to let his hands go.
‘It was a hell of a fight, hell of a fight, and as gutted as we are Daniel deserves a lot of credit because tonight was his crowning night. Not being elevated to interim champion, tonight was the night I believe he became a real world champion.’
Hearn has also dismissed suggestions that Joshua should retire after suffering the fourth defeat of his professional career and suggests a rematch against Dubois could be on the cards for 2025.
‘It’s probably the whole time in his whole career I’ve seen him hurt, so it’s not bad having won two world heavyweight championships, 13 world championship fights and that’s the only time he’s really been hurt – to a point where he couldn’t get up,’ Hearn said.
‘Heavyweights get knocked out all the time. You never want to see a heavyweight get knocked out but it is the first time in his career he’s been properly hurt.
‘So you never want to see it, you never want to carry on too long but at the same time AJ is a heavyweight who doesn’t actually have many miles on the clock, in all honesty.
‘The moment Ben [Davison] comes to me and says, ‘he doesn’t look the same fighter any more’, and by the way, AJ is the one who will call that shot before anyone.
‘Fighters sometimes need saving from themselves, AJ is a smart guy, he’s got a big team of people around him, we all know we’ve seen the best AJ over the last year, so it’s difficult to say just because he got chinned tonight, ‘that’s it’.
‘He’s in the closing chapters in his career, there’s no doubt about that, and now, obviously, we have another fight with Riyadh Season and Turki Alalshikh, and Daniel Dubois is part of that plan but so too could be Tyson Fury or another heavyweight, so I think 2025 is going to be an interesting year for Anthony Joshua, one way or the other.
‘But he will definitely be back, whether it will be against Daniel Dubois or Tyson Fury, whoever, you’re going to be entertained because that was incredibly entertaining, albeit you don’t want to see your fighter get beat like that.
‘Our interests are for him to leave this sport with legacy, with a huge amount of money in the bank but also with his health intact and if you start getting knocked out like that you certainly have to look at it.
‘But really this was the first time in his career where he hasn’t been able to get off the deck – and there’s been many times he’s been down and never not tried to getup, but that one was just a shot. When you try and land an uppercut and you get caught trading by a huge right hand, doesn’t matter who you are, you’re getting knocked out, unfortunately it happened with a lot of damage on the clock and that’s perhaps why it ended the way it did.’