Boxing: is Joshua one of the all-time greats?

It’s the question every boxing fan is now asking, said Steve Bunce in The Independent. “Just how good” is Anthony Joshua? The 28-year-old Londoner retained his three world heavyweight titles in brilliant form at Wembley on Saturday, stopping Russian challenger Alexander Povetkin in the seventh round. It was his 22nd victory, all but one by knockout, and his seventh consecutive world title fight. His wins “compare favourably with just about every champion in history”: all that’s missing is a “real nemesis”. The true greats in boxing “fight their equals and those fights must be peak against peak”. Muhammad Ali had Joe Frazier; Mike Tyson had Evander Holyfield. Who will Joshua prove himself against? Everyone already knows the answer, said Kevin Mitchell in The Guardian. Joshua’s next fight will be at Wembley on 13 April 2019, and he is “quietly adamant” that his opponent will be Deontay Wilder, the American fighter who holds the one major heavyweight belt Joshua doesn’t have: the WBC title. But in December Wilder is fighting ex-champion Tyson Fury and if Fury wins, there’s likely to be a rematch, ruling Wilder out of an April clash with Joshua. If so, he would no doubt have to settle for a bout with Dillian Whyte, against whom he lost as an amateur, but beat earlier on as a professional career.

That would be a huge shame, said Paul Hayward in The Daily Telegraph. A Joshua-wilder bout would be an “impresario’s fantasy: a unification showdown between undefeated fighters”. It would be the natural “climax” to the “Joshua story”. But whoever Joshua takes on, it will be a big occasion. His last four bouts have “a combined gate of more than 300,000”; in pay-per-view terms, his fights are “national events”. Dedicated and likeable, Joshua has pretty much single-handedly “rescued the heavyweight division from its long slide to obscurity”. Whatever happens from here, he deserves enormous credit for that.