Anthony Joshua working with Mike Tyson's ex-trainer for Oleksandr Usyk rematch

Anthony Joshua has started to train with Mike Tyson’s former coach Ronnie Shields ahead of his rematch against Oleksandr Usyk.

Joshua lost his WBA, WBO, IBF and IBO heavyweight titles last month as Usyk secured a unanimous decision victory.

Following his defeat, Joshua and his current head trainer Rob McCracken have received criticism for their approach to the fight against Usyk.

Joshua, who has already activated his rematch clause, has visited various gyms in the United States in an effort to change his game plan for the second fight against the Ukrainian.

And Shields, who is based in Texas and has trained the likes of Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker and Arturo Gatti, has made it clear he is keen to work with Joshua on a permanent basis.

‘It was them who reached out to me,’ Shields said in an interview with ThaBoxingVoice.

‘They reached out to me and they asked me would I be interested in taking a look at AJ and he would like to come down to Texas and see if things could work out between him and I.

‘I said, ‘yeah, no problem, I would love to take a look at him, love to see if we can mesh together’.

‘You could say it was kind of like an audition but for me, every time I talk boxing, boxing is boxing, I don’t care who I’m talking boxing with. There’s no such thing for me as getting nerves or anything like that because I do this every day, this is not something that’s new to me. Names don’t mean anything to me, if I can help somebody I’ll help somebody, I just tell them what I think and how I feel. I didn’t get nervous or anything like that because I’ve been here too many times, I’ve done it too many times.

‘For a heavyweight, it would be great to get him to reclaim his world titles that he lost to Usyk and I think I’ve got the capabilities to help him to do that.

‘In the last two days everything seemed to go well. The first day was just all talk, we talked for about three or four hours.

‘And when he came back today I told him I wanted to do just some light pad work with him just to show him everything we talked about because you can talk it but you’re going to have to be able to prove and show a fighter what you mean and how you do things. I just put him through some drills that made him understand what I was talking about the day before.

‘We watched a few rounds of the Usyk fight together and I just pointed out some things that I thought he should’ve done that he didn’t do.

‘We had a great talk yesterday, today was even greater. There’s something I showed him that he said, ‘man, I was never taught to do this’.

‘It surprises me that a guy who was heavyweight champion of the world doesn’t know certain things.

‘Like he said, ‘European boxing is different from boxing in the United States’. He realised that he had to come to the United States to get something different.

‘Obviously it wasn’t the right game plan, I told him he didn’t fight like himself. I think he’s a much better fighter than what he showed in that Usyk fight.

‘I watched a few rounds with him and his team, I told him about certain things and he said, ‘yeah man, that’s what we should’ve done, but we didn’t do it’.

‘When you have a game plan you have to work on it every day, you have to get it down pat before that fight and when you get in there you have to do things you did in the gym.

‘I don’t know what their game plan was, obviously it wasn’t the right one and I guess he didn’t feel like it was the right one so this is why he wanted to make a change.

‘I’m going to tell you the first thing he told me when he came here, he told me, ‘listen, I know people don’t think that I’m a dog, I’m just a pure boxer, look, I’m gonna be a dog in this next fight’. And that’s his words.

‘He told me, ‘I’m gonna be a dog in this fight, I just need you to show me how to be the best dog that you can teach me to be’.

‘That answered the question for me because my thing to him was, ‘why did you box the whole time?’, and he said he thought he could out-box him, and that was the game plan, to me that was the wrong fight, now he knows that was the wrong fight.

‘To teach a man to be a dog he has to have the dog instincts in him already. He says he has it in him, if things work out and I’m training him and once it comes down to it, now in the gym is the time to show it and in the fight you’ve got to show it too. It’s going to be hard work, we sat down and talked about everything and I think everything went great.’

Asked if he feels Joshua has enough to beat Tyson Fury, Shields replied: ‘Oh absolutely.

‘He’s a lot bigger than I thought he was, he’s not fat, he’s trained up pretty good, he has the stature, anybody who can punch and knows how to put punches together has a chance against a guy like Tyson Fury.

‘But him and I never talked about Tyson Fury, his whole thing was Usyk, he knows in order to get to Tyson Fury he’s got to get by Usyk first and that’s number one priority.’

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