Michael Bisping praises Anthony Joshua for taking the Francis Ngannou fight.
Joshua (27-3) meets Ngannou (0-1) in a 10-round heavyweight boxing match March 8 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Joshua is coming off a fifth-round corner stoppage of Otto Wallin this past December.
After Ngannou stunned the masses by dropping WBC champion Tyson Fury in a close decision loss, Bisping thinks Joshua has nothing to gain in a risky fight against Ngannou.
“AJ does deserve a lot of respect here,” Bisping said on his “Believe You Me” podcast. “He has no need to box Francis Ngannou, doesn’t really gain anything with a win other than solidifying another victory then being 4-0 in his last four and probably will get the winner of Usyk and Tyson Fury. But he probably would have got that anyway. I think this is happening because Deontay Wilder was probably the guy in the mix, they thought he would beat Joseph Parker, and he didn’t.”
On the other hand, Bisping credits Ngannou for landing another mega fight just five months after boxing Tyson Fury to a split decision loss.
“I think for Francis Ngannou, it’s great,” Bisping said. “For him, there’s been a lot of questions answered. Can he compete with these boxers? Can he even land a glove? Can he take a shot from these guys? Does he have the stamina to go 10, 12 rounds? Does he have the ability to maintain the power throughout that kind of period, as well?
“These were all questions. These were all unknowns. Well, the answer to all those questions were yes, we saw that when he fought Tyson Fury. Tyson Fury, even though he swears blind that he did train for that fight, physically he looked terrible. He looked awful, he looked sloppy, his technique was crap. He still beat Francis Ngannou.”
For more on the fight, visit MMA Junkie’s hub for Joshua vs. Ngannou.
