Charles Martin thinks Anthony Joshua is scared to get hit, would do rematch but not in UK

Charles Martin has always been a little touchy about his 2016 stoppage loss to Anthony Joshua, which came just three months after he won the IBF heavyweight title on a fluky knee injury to Vyacheslav Glazkov, and it appears he remains so, which is understandable enough; he was embarrassed by the loss, after all.

Martin got a little testy about it in a chat with Sky Sports:

“He knocked me down twice but I would knock him out. There wouldn’t be no referee stoppage. KO. I know what he’s about. He hit me with clean shots and I was laughing at him. I was like: ‘What the hell? ’The whole crowd was laughing at me. I was embarrassed. I wasn’t hurt at all.”

Now by memory you might think “Prince” Charles has just gone full delusional, but you can see it here:

He’s not lying — he absolutely has a smile and even a chuckle on that second knockdown, as both came back-to-back on quick, hard right hands from AJ. Martin took his time getting up the first time but seemed together overall, then got dropped again and tried to do the same the second time. Referee Jean-Pierre Van Imschoot ruled him counted out, though, but in all honesty Martin does look like he could have continued. Should he have? Different question. Did he really, truly want to? That’s stuff people will debate, but only Martin really knows.

Martin (28-2-1, 25 KO) has been sort of in and out of the scene since the AJ fight. He came back a year later and picked up two easy wins in 2017, then lost a competitive decision to Adam Kownacki in 2018. In 2019, he went 2-0, both pretty easy wins (though Greg Corbin battering his testicles probably wasn’t any fun), and in February he stopped Gerald Washington in the sixth round on the Wilder-Fury 2 undercard.

That win over Washington put him back in the mix with the IBF, with whom he has a high ranking again and a path to another shot at the belt.

At 33, Martin does have legitimate power in his left hand, enough to be plenty dangerous, but he’ll have to prove to a lot of skeptics that he’s a serious contender in what has become a pretty damn solid heavyweight division.

As for the potential of fighting Joshua again, he says he wouldn’t want to go to the UK to do it, and he feels that Joshua not only doesn’t like fighting away from his comfort zone, but that he doesn’t like getting hit. “He can’t weather a storm,” Martin says of Joshua.

I’m fully aware that this sounds crazy to a lot of you, and it does to me, too, to a degree. I remain a Charles Martin skeptic as far as fighting well on that level goes.

Click through on that link, too, because he also goes into Deontay Wilder’s 40-pound suit, his thoughts on Tyson Fury after seeing him backstage and in action in February, and more.