Once-beaten heavyweight contender Joe ‘Juggernaut’ Joyce 15-1 (14) is confident he has made the tweaks he needed in training camp to get one back on sole conqueror Zhilei ‘Big Bang’ Zhang 25-1-1 (20).
Back in April the 37-year-old Brit was upset by Chinese southpaw Zhang, 40, who stopped him in the sixth round.
Joyce struggled to adapt to Zhang’s left-handed stance but says he has corrected this flaw in camp for their immediate rematch which will take place at Wembley Arena in London, England on September 23.
“I’m feeling good. I’m focused, a bit heavier and good to go,” Joyce said in an interview with Carl Frampton. “If I’d won the fight like that then no mistakes I’d made in the first camp would have been corrected. Going forward it’s given me a wake up call to get things right.
“I’ve got everything right. I’ve been a lot more disciplined and focused and switched on. Maybe I took my eye off the ball a little bit in the first fight and I’m just making sure I’ve ticked all the boxes and dotted all the i’s.
“It’s a bit more practice with the southpaw stance in terms of sparring and technique and tactics but also getting my body bigger and stronger and more ready for the job of fighting Zhang.
“Zhang surprised me with his speedy accuracy and power and I got the tactics wrong on the night. There were a lot of things to nitpick that have been handled in this camp.”
But the only man to defeat Zhang, Filip ‘El Animal’ Hrgovic 16-0 (13), thinks the result will be the same.
“Probably, because he got his number, right?” the 31-year-old Croatian who won a close unanimous decision over Zhang in August last year told Seconds Out. “He will probably be much more confident and he beat him already.
“It’s a funny thing because in the first fight nobody gave a chance to Zhang and now everyone is talking different. Everyone is talking that he’s gonna kill him in the rematch.
“Boxing is so strange, and boxing people. One day one guy’s great, one day another guy. People change their opinions very often.
“But I think if Joyce can endure for six, seven, eight rounds to not get knocked out, I think Zhang will gas out and Joyce can beat him. But he needs to survive this first rounds because Zhang is big guy and he’s fast and accurate.
“The thing with Joe Joyce, he’s not Filip Hrgovic. He’s not from Croatia. He can’t take these shots. There’s only one man with steel chin, and this man you are talking with right now.”
Hrgovic is the IBF number one contender and is expected to land a shot at unified champion Oleksandr Usyk 21-0 (14) early next year.
