World Heavyweight boxers Anthony Joshua and New Zealand's Joseph Parker hold their belts. Photo / AP
World Heavyweight boxers Anthony Joshua and New Zealand's Joseph Parker hold their belts. Photo / AP
This was about as close as Anthony Joshua, normally such a dignified presence in the heavyweight division, comes to trash-talk.
In the decorous surrounds of The Dorchester in London, Joshua, riled by days of stage-managed barbs from Joseph Parker's camp that he had a "glass chin", jabbed his finger at his Kiwi opponent and claimed that no man could prevent him becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
In the days before confirmation of this latest super-fight, scheduled for Cardiff's Principality Stadium on April 1, Parker and his team had dialled up the tension by highlighting how Joshua had been dropped on the canvas during both his amateur and professional career.
But Joshua, clearly unimpressed, rounded on Parker and his promoter David Higgins for pulling a "PR stunt".
Indeed, he launched into a passionate defence of each of the three occasions he had been floored, disclosing that he had only just emerged from a police cell – the result of a brief altercation, apparently – before he was knocked down by David Price in sparring in 2010.
It would, Joshua, give him no cause for concern as he prepared to face Parker in the first clash between reigning heavyweight champions on British soil.
Anthony Joshua speaks during a media conference with Joseph Parker. Photo / AP
Insisting that he had shown his resilience by clambering off the floor en route to last year's 11th-round stoppage of Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley, Joshua said: "There is a lot of talk about me being dropped, but there have been only three times it has happened.
"The first was the European Championships, when only two weeks before I had called back into the programme, because I was banned from the British team. I was very unfit but I got stopped, not dropped.
"The second time was with David Price, when I had just come out a police cell. Price is a puncher and that was down to a lack of experience.
"And Klitschko taught me that it will take more than a human to stop me from going where I am going. The rumours the Parker camp have heard are all fake news."
While many expect Joshua's superior height and reach to reduce the fight with Parker to a non-contest, a mere prelude to a unification bout with Deontay Wilder in the US, the nonchalant New Zealander plainly thought otherwise.
"I have a big challenge in front of me," he said, at one of the more restrained press conferences of Eddie Hearn's promotional career, with not even a hint of a dust-up or a flipped table. "I have watched Joshua for a long time. I know his strengths, he knows mine. I know his weaknesses, he thinks he knows mine. And I'm hoping to catch him on the chin and knock him out."
