Anthony Joshua can help heal boxing, but Wladimir Klitschko fight will be an F1 race after three years of bumper cars

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Dan Jones18 October 2016

On November 30, 1956, at Chicago Stadium, a fit, fast, heavy-handed 21-year old called Floyd Patterson knocked out the great Archie Moore in five rounds.

The fight was for the world heavyweight championship, which had been left vacant when Rocky Marciano announced his retirement. Patterson’s win made him the youngest-ever heavyweight champion of the world. The record stood for almost exactly three decades, until it was broken by Mike Tyson in 1986.

That fight made Patterson a star. But it was also a bellwether for a new era of heavyweight boxing, as the sport exploded between the late 1950s and late 1970s: the age of Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. That is still the age against which the sport is measured, and with good reason.

Anthony Joshua, now 27 but with only a modest 17 professional fights to his name, is not Patterson. By the same token, Wladimir Klitschko is 40, but he is not Moore. And today’s champion in abeyance, Tyson Fury, is nobody’s idea of Marciano.

Nevertheless, the Joshua-Klitschko megafight which is now all but confirmed for Manchester on December 10 may just be a chance for heavyweight boxing to reboot itself, just as it did in Illinois 60 years ago.

Joshua’s promoter, Eddie Hearn, has been talking up his £30million fight by arguing, with a nudge and a wink, that it has no business taking place. Over the weekend he said it was “not the right fight” for his man — meaning that it is too early in Joshua’s career to be facing a boxer who started out in the pro game in the autumn of 1996, when Tyson was still the baddest man on the planet and just developing a taste for earlobes.

Joshua vs Breazeale: Fight and Undercard In Pictures

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Does that mean that Hearn and Joshua suspect they won’t win, but can’t resist a taste of thirty million big ones? The suggestion doesn’t hurt the promotion, and it has the virtue of being entirely credible. Joshua may have an IBF world title and magazine-cover looks, but nothing can change the fact that he is skipping onto the world stage following a clutch of bouts against chancing duffers.

No one has taken Joshua more than seven rounds, and while that is testament to his ability to knock out bums, it also means that he will be completely unprepared for the championship stanzas, should they come against Klitschko. In effect, Joshua is stepping into an F1 race after three years spent on the bumper cars.

Yet, by the same token, nobody knows who he will be fighting. The Klitschko who so contemptuously locked out David Haye over 12 tortuous rounds in Hamburg in 2011 has not been seen for some time.

Certainly it was not the invincible, impervious Klitschko who we last saw trudging around the ring and clutching Fury in Dusselforf in November 2015. The Klitschko who turned up to that wretched fight looked as athletic as ever, but he fought like an android with his battery life down to 10 per cent.

And, of course, he lost — to a 27-year-old whose relatively short record contained little more than beat-downs of overrated Americans and journeyman fellow Brits.

In that sense, when Joshua and Klitschko meet, history could be revisited in a variety of ways. We are dreaming to hope that Joshua heals heavyweight boxing in the space of one evening’s work. All the same, he, Hearn and the Klitschko camp deserve plaudits for rolling up their sleeves and making a big fight happen.

Whoever wins, there will be no shortage of action afterwards, particularly if Fury returns. And in boxing, any big fight is better than no big fight.

The joke's over for Kyrgios

As the tennis year winds down, Andy Murray is chasing the world No1 ranking. Nick Kyrgios, meanwhile, has already landed the title of 2016’s leading talent-squanderer, with an eight-tournament-week ban that will keep him out until mid-January.

What once was amusing petulance is now becoming slightly sad: Kyrgios plainly cannot cope with the basic fabric of professionalism, and he seems to be getting worse, not better, as his career goes on. The joke’s over. It’s time for Kyrgios to sort himself out.

Super Sarries are good news for England

Saracens’ 31-23 win at Toulon in the European Rugby Champions Cup was, in a word, awesome.

It isn’t often anyone scrags Toulon, let alone making them look like a scratch side, but that’s what Sarries did, powered by Jamie George, Mako Vunipola, Maro Itoje and George Kruis up front and a returning Owen Farrell behind.

Eddie Jones has rightly taken much of the credit for England’s recent rugby revival. But Mark McCall should take some too, for turning England’s Saracen spine into world-beaters.

Can Hameed or Duckett doge debut hoodoo?

It has become a fool’s game to predict long-term success for any cricketer making their debut as an England Test-match opener.

Let’s hope that either Ben Duckett or Haseeb Hameed can buck the trend when one of the two opens alongside Alastair Cook in Bangladesh on Thursday.

The examples of Alex Hales, Adam Lyth, Sam Robson, Nick Compton and Michael Carberry do not augur especially well, but soon, surely, someone is going to have to succeed. Good luck to them both.

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