Sluggish Andy Ruiz gives Anthony Joshua a free pass to redemption

Weeks of promotional hype and political outrage ended in Anthony Joshua easing past an opponent who had barely bothered to train as the so-called “Clash on the Dunes” drifted into anti-climax on a Saudi Arabian Saturday night.

Anthony Joshua lands a left glove on Andy Ruiz Jr in Saudi Arabia. Picture: AFP/Getty

A focused and disciplined back-foot performance from the 30-year-old Briton wrested back his world heavyweight titles by unanimous points decision over a woefully out-of-shape Andy Ruiz Jr.

An unprecedented event had taken one last bizarre twist when a large proportion of the country’s 59mm annual rainfall dumped itself on the partially covered arena in the hours and minutes leading up to its headline contest.

But in the end it was the fight itself that proved a wash-out as Joshua picked and prodded his way to a victory which appeared secure long before the three judges handed down their 118-110 (twice), 119-109 landslide verdicts.

“Maybe I could have done more but simplicity is genius,” said Joshua, who picked up a British record purse in excess of £60 million for a win which places him back at the top of the heavyweight table. “I took it back to the old school, seventies style, and outclassed the current champion.

“There was a time when I looked into Andy’s eyes and wanted to put my fist through his head. But then I thought, this is boxing, it’s not wrestling. I had to box to my plan.”

Hopes of a repeat of the five-knockdown classic in which Ruiz prevailed in their first fight in June was stirred by a lively start which saw both men bloodied around their respective left eyes by the end of round two. But it soon became clear that Ruiz’s one-stone weight gain was hampering his chances to get inside Joshua’s jab as the challenger broadly stuck to the script.

Despite some worrying moments when Ruiz almost succeeded in luring him into his kind of close-up contest – notably when he barged in behind a right hand at the end of the eighth – Joshua was for the most part given a free pass to redemption. Suspicions had been raised that Ruiz had taken the ‘Buster’ Douglas route to his title reign when he weighed in on Friday more than a stone heavier than for their first meeting, and the heaviest ever for a title fight outside the seven-foot Russian Nikolai Valuev.

And the Mexican-American was brutally honest during his post-fight media duties, in which he conceded apparently without a hint of irony: “There’s just a lot of things that were going on my plate.”

Ruiz added: “I should have trained harder. Maybe if I hadn’t put on all this weight I would have been faster.”

Ruiz’s calls for a third meeting are likely to be rejected as Joshua moves up to clean up one of two outstanding mandatory defences against Oleksandr Usyk or Kubrat Pulev.