It was a right hand thrown from so far out and with such an arced trajectory that Daniel Dubois’ black glove almost scraped the base of the famous Wembley arch.
It dropped Anthony Joshua heavily, causing the man with the physique of a Greek statue to crumble onto his haunches and woozily stand, like a sap in a zephyr.
The bell saved Joshua the job of having to find his senses too rapidly as the first round closed but Dubois knew what he had in front of him and the predator clobbered Joshua’s head this way and that with an untamed violence through the second round.
The introverted and at times awkward Dubois was not the ungainly mass of muscles he is sometimes accused of being at press conferences. He was not the brooding, silent and disengaged participant of interviews; instead cranking up the volume with his fists while causing a stunned silence to descend upon an initially hushed and shaken Wembley.
Dubois sensed the early ending. Each pounding jab that walloped into Joshua’s face inched the youngster closer to the finish line and in the second – the only round of the five that Dubois failed to send Joshua to the canvas – Dubois outmatched Joshua with the jab. Joshua was too often out of range, and he carried his chin too high for Dubois to miss. And in a young, strong and ambitious Dubois, who had his tail up from the first round, Joshua met a physical equal who he could not push back in clinches.
Don Charles, the head trainer of Dubois, who through fight week was the subject of rumors of a camp rift while bedridden with a cold, spoke to his charge between sessions and Dubois lumped away with both hammers early in the third.
Dubois is a serious hitter. While writing Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing, I took Dubois on the pads for a shoot for the then BT Sport.
It was at the Peacock Gym in Canning Town and Dubois’ then coach Martin Bowers gave me the pads.
Thinking Dubois and I would start softly with the odd jab or one-two, I held the pads for Daniel and he unleashed a left and right. I’m not a small guy. I have held a lot of pads. Searing pains shot down my shoulders and into each hand and my first thought was Damage, and how no one’s head and/or brain could possibly take that kind of trauma. I’ve thought that each time Dubois has fought since, and can’t equate how a human head – like Oleksandr Usyk’s – does not split like a watermelon, or cause a scene of devastation such as the death of Pedro Pascal as Oberyn in Game of Thrones.
Needless to say, I barely survived the round before Bowers saved me, from myself, the BT cameras and Dubois.
Promoter Eddie Hearn said Joshua made it through the third round in Wembley in survival mode, too. Joshua at times loaded up big shots to change the direction of the one-way traffic he was rooted in but Joshua was also restricted to jabbing and holding or just holding in his bid to clear the falling cobwebs.
As the third neared its climax, Dubois fired a left hook into Joshua’s face and the 2012 Olympic gold medallist lurched uncomfortably backwards, his right ankle seemingly buckling beneath him as his back found the ropes. Joshua held his gloves high, trying to ride out the storm, but an avalanche of leather tumbled into his face and body and he hit the canvas once more. He climbed onto all fours to make it back to his feet, and referee Marcus McDonnell gave Joshua a count which, having survived that, allowed him to absorb a minute of quiet from the noise of pounding gloves between rounds.
But almost immediately as the fourth opened, Joshua was sent sprawling once more, tagged by a slightly more innocuous looking left and right, but given what had already gone before, Joshua was likely concussed and not in true control of his behavior, senses, or his legs. His default setting of courage, and his inbuilt ability of addressing a crisis by fighting fire with fire, saw him step up and straight back to Dubois, but the mission was increasingly perilous.
Fronting up, Joshua tapped his chest on both sides and waded back in, and when he tipped over again it was immediately unclear as to whether referee McDonnell was either waving the fight off or indicating he had felt Joshua had had enough. Either assessment would have been just fine.
As it was, Joshua was still in the fight that he was in reality already out of. It was ruled a slip.
The stunned Wembley silence of the earliest rounds was long gone. The fever, awaiting the violent conclusion, had whipped the expectant audience into a frenzy. Ringsiders, from Conor McGregor to Tyson Fury to Guy Richie and Terence Crawford and Devin Haney and Rio Ferdinand bobbed up and down from their seats with each fusillade that threatened to close the show.
And Dubois couldn’t miss with the big shots. Joshua was too upright. He was pulling back in straight lines, with his chin up and throwing big shots without teasing openings. That final faux pas would eventually cause his dramatic downfall amid the carnage.
With 30 seconds remaining in the fourth, Joshua stuck his tongue out, spitting more psychological defiance than physical.
Oddly in the next session, Joshua seemed to have found a second wind. Pop returned to his punches. There was a controlled ambition etched across his face, although his low hands were a cause of concern. They invited Dubois assaults.
Acting calm, Joshua stuck his tongue out once more, this time knowingly nodding to a ringsider in a clinch, painfully unaware that within 30 seconds he would be lying face down, fight over, with the shock of some 90,000 fans disappearing into the Wembley night sky.
Yet when the final demolition arrived, it caught everyone off guard. Because moments after sticking his tongue out and nodding, Joshua popped a jab between Dubois’ eyes and vaulted in with a right hand that caused Dubois to dance. An astonishing, historic turnaround was on. A second Joshua right hand. A third Joshua right hand.
“Oh my God.”
Dubois was backing up – but he wasn’t reeling – and when Joshua tried to unfurl a right uppercut from distance, too far a distance, a Dubois chopping right hand – a shorter, faster punch – cut Joshua off at the source. The thudding blow cut Joshua’s legs from under him and the fight was over. Joshua landed in the recovery position, but he couldn’t recover.
Joshua die-hards remained rooted to their chairs but the neutrals and fight fans leapt deliriously into the air. The fifth-round firefight, with Joshua seemingly about to turn things around and victory momentarily flashing in his eyes, proved a mere oasis, a mirage from the incessant pounding of the previous four rounds, respite before the final hammer blow that ended his evening and this rebuilding phase of Joshua’s astonishing career.
The occasion marked not only a new chapter for the fighters, whatever their trajectory might be, but for this era of heavyweights. Between them, the generation’s big four of Usyk, Fury, Joshua and Wilder only have a handful of fights left between them, and suddenly the sales pitch is as much nostalgia – certainly for Joshua-Wilder – as it is determining who is the best, in the case of Usyk and Fury.
And now it is the turn of Dubois to lead the charge of the new generation. Having turned pro young, with only a comparatively brief amateur career behind him, he had boxed just 90 pro rounds heading into Saturday’s fight. He not only has time on his side but a low mileage. He has learned plenty, too, particularly in defeat and the aftermath of his losses to Joe Joyce and Usyk. They have made him a far more rounded fighter than two more knock overs and a sparkling KO record ever could have.
There is plenty to be said for having to go back to the drawing board, be it tactically or mentally, and building on lessons learned – regardless of how harsh they were at the time. The negativity surrounding those defeats are likely what have fuelled plenty of subsequent training sessions, given him a devil-may-care attitude, and have set him up for walking through the fire that has allowed him to become a virtual lock for Fighter of the Year, with victories over Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Joshua.
The light shone brightly on Joshua post-fight. The inquisition around tactics raged through the weekend, but whatever strategy is adopted pre-fight, it is hard to stick to that when Dubois is unleashing his heavy artillery, causing the life to leave your legs and your hands to hang low following the build-up of lactic acid in your shoulders. That, in combination with tingling neurological signals that might not even be your own any longer, and an already uphill task becomes mountainous.
Joshua has left an indelible mark on British boxing, specifically, and his many plusses will long outweigh any perceived negatives.
The light should deservedly shine on Daniel Dubois, now. Joshua’s unravelling began with that arcing right hand, and it did not just signal the beginning of the end for the Watford A-lister on that Wembley eve, but it might have signalled the beginning of a new era of heavyweight boxing.