Anthony Joshua regains heavyweight titles with classy points win over Andy Ruiz Jr in Saudi Arabia

He might be £70 million richer, a stone lighter, and far too deferential to his Saudi paymasters for comfort, but ultimately, all that matters to Anthony Joshua is that he is once again the heavyweight champion of the world. With a boxing display full of the guile and calculation that had deserted him in New York six months earlier, he wrested back his four belts from the fleshy midriff of Andy Ruiz and signalled a renewed appetite to dominate this sport’s most brutal division.

It would be a stretch to accuse Joshua of running scared in this fight, but the “Clash of the Dunes”, far from being the thunderous collision that many had envisaged, was a study in the wariness and restraint that Joshua had learned from his first humbling by Ruiz. Determined that he would not make the same mistakes for the encore, he showed off his newly-acquired mastery of defence, never wasting a shot and fending off everything that Ruiz had to throw at him.