IN LIFE you have to give credit where it’s due, and just as it was due to Eddie Hearn and Sky Sports Boxing for the Fight Camp series they successfully pulled off back in August in the extensive grounds of Matchroom Sports HQ in rural Essex, it’s also now due to rival promoter Frank Warren and his broadcasting partner BT Sport for ensuring that we can look forward to a feast of heavyweight boxing as this annus horribilis, turned upside down by a virus, winds down to a its welcome end.

The announcement that the eagerly anticipated domestic heavyweight clash between Daniel Dubois and Joe Joyce will finally take place behind closed doors on 28 November is further enhanced by Warren’s pledge to organise a domestic PPV card headlined by Tyson Fury around Christmas time — this to be presented as a homecoming fight for the current WBC, Ring Magazine and self-styled lineal heavyweight champion, who by then will have been out of the ring for over a year. 

Dubois v Joyce is a classic youth versus experience match up, and a fight that comes with the guarantee of fireworks. On the line will be the vacant WBU European title along with Dubois’s Commonwealth title in a fight that will be his sternest test yet, as in Joe Joyce you have yourself something approximating to a freak in human form. 

Known as “Juggernaut,” Joyce at 35 is a man in a hurry. Arriving relatively late to the pro ranks after a fine amateur career saw him take a super heavyweight Commonwealth gold at the 2014 Glasgow games and a silver at the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, since turning pro in 2017 the giant Londoner has stopped every one of the 11 luckless opponents.

Dubois, meanwhile, is already at just 23 being widely tipped as a future world champion. His 15-fight undefeated record to date includes 14 KOs, placing him in the same category as Joyce when it comes to power. This is one fight that will not be going the distance.

As for Fury, the news that Wilder III will now not be happening until the first quarter of 2021 makes it imperative that he enjoys an outing before then. With this in mind, his planned homecoming fight at the end of this year will doubtless be a tune up against an opponent yet to be determined.

This being said, the new model Fury is a fighter who stays in shape and on top of his weight year round, evidenced in recent footage of him ticking over with Detroit-based trainer Javan “Sugar” Hill, who’s just spent a month in England helping to keep him sharp and ticking over.

Staying with Hill, Fury’s decision to switch from Ben Davison to the American as his trainer has proved the final link in an otherwise near faultless package.

Though Davison did a superb job of helping get Fury back in shape and equipped to face Wilder in their first clash, Hill brings something else to the table — an offensive Kronk style which Fury has wholeheartedly embraced, wherein he brings added size and power to proceedings with the objective of deploying smart aggression to dominate his opposition with seek-and-destroy in mind, rather than as previously focusing on eluding and countering.

When it comes to Wilder, the demolition he suffered at the hands of Fury last time out on 1 December 2019 — until saved by co-trainer Mark Breland mercifully throwing in the towel in the seventh round — you might think would have resulted in a few salutary lessons being learned. Based, however, on the announcement that he’s decided to dispense with Breland’s services in his corner, you’d be wrong.

The result is a fighter choosing to avoid confronting the inconvenient truths posed by his demise at the Staples Center in downtown LA on that memorable occasion, and instead taking comfort in listening to what he wants to hear from head trainer Jay Deas, a man whom to my mind puts the yes into “yes man.”

Breland, a former Olympic and world champion, earned the respect of everyone in boxing — apart, that is, from Wilder and the aforementioned Deas — when he threw in the towel to prevent the now former WBC heavyweight champion not only being stopped but perhaps permanently damaged against Tyson last year, such was the concussive onslaught he was being subjected to. Thus his fate is a particularly cruel one.

Wilder is a fighter and man who makes great play of the ring not as a place of sport, albeit a brutal one, but as an arena of unarmed combat wherein death and destruction are the ultimate and acceptable consequences of being a “warrior,” should push come to lethal shove. He has also voiced on more than one occasion that he would, and I quote, “like a body on my record.”

Such a perverse and grotesque approach to the sport of boxing is the acme of distaste, redolent of a man in genuine need of a reality check. Whatever else Fury’s one-way battering of Wilder achieved the last time they met, it sadly failed to produce one, resulting in Mark Breland being shown the door. This will likely be to Wilder’s detriment with the third clash against Fury looming. 

Breland knows boxing inside out, while Deas knows how to box clever, reflected in the way he went public immediately after the second fight with Fury in his criticism of Breland’s decision to throw in the towel — essentially throwing his co-trainer under the bus. 

In a sport where rampant egotism exists side by side with rampant risks, the importance of having at least one voice in your camp willing to tell you what you don’t want to hear for your own good and betterment as a fighter is critical. 

Mark Breland should not find it too difficult to find alternative employment as a trainer. Another product of Emmanuel Steward’s legendary Kronk Gym in Detroit, he possesses the kind of experience that is currency in the pro ranks. He also possesses integrity, which is about as rare as hen’s teeth in a sport whose sinners out number its saints by a factor of a hundred — and this on a good day.