After the "sucker punch" of the first cancellation, Joshua Buatsi is determined to defeat Dan Azeez when they box on their new date of February 3, live on Sky Sports; Buatsi begins his training camp in the USA this week and won't return to London until fight week
Wednesday 22 November 2023 08:12, UK
Joshua Buatsi is giving up his Christmas in order to defeat Dan Azeez.
Buatsi was due to box Azeez on October 21. But the latter had to withdraw on the week of the fight due to a back injury.
Despite Buatsi's hopes to reset the fight before the end of the year, it has now been rescheduled for February 3.
He will depart for training camp in America with coach Virgil Hunter and won't return to London until it's time to fight.
It gives Buatsi's preparations to fight his sparring partner-turned-rival a new edge. "There's definitely a frustration tied to it now," he told Sky Sports. "There's been something added now to the fight for me anyway. I wouldn't say spite but I'd say more vim.
"That's been added because there's a price to pay and I feel I paid it to get the win October 21.
"Money - 100 per cent. Time - of course, we were there for months. And effort - the blood was coming, the blood was flowing and the sweat was in abundance."
Missing Christmas is another element to chalk up in the debit column.
The upcoming camp will be tough. "It's going to be a hard one. One that I have to do and get through and puts me in a good place going into the fight on February 3. But it's going to be a hard one for sure," he said.
An unaccustomed anger, after the cancellation, will fuel him. "When there's something on the horizon everything else blacks out and I focus on that date. So sometimes the disappointment hits me very hard if something doesn't go according to plan because I've focused on it for months and months and months," Buatsi explained.
"A sucker punch. I didn't see it coming. We can always be upset by many things but that for me was very upsetting, with the reasoning of why it happened. It came four days before.
"There's so many conspiracy theories online. There's so many ideas and thoughts of what could have happened, it was a hard pill to swallow just because it was so close to the fight. I was still dieting, I was still making weight, still being careful with everything as it was just the finishing touches of camp. For it not to have gone ahead. It was so hard, so, so hard."
But he reflected: "We fight February 3 and we make sure we get the win."
Buatsi however does expect to use the extra camp productively.
"There will be a lot of time off but it's just going to give me more time to get better at certain things," he said. "More time to practise, train and get things right.
"As the student that I am, I make sure I give as much time as I can to this craft so I learn quicker and improve at a rate that I'm happy with."
Buatsi might have sparred Azeez for years, but he is adamant that the Lewisham man has not seen everything he's capable of.
"He's experienced me having a scrap, having a tear up and he's experienced me when I'm tactically trying to do something. I just feel like, for a while since we sparred, I've learned so much more," Buatsi said. "New things that he hasn't seen from me.
"I will box but I will also fight. I'm not someone that only knows how to do one style. I've shown fights where I come out and I'm purely boxing, for example my fight against [Pawel] Stepien. And other fights where I'm prepared to fight from the get go and we can handle business and get straight to the job and what it is that I want to do, which to win by knockout."
As he develops, as his defensive skills get better with Virgil Hunter, he believes that makes him more dangerous.
"You have to learn to protect yourself. I knew a few ways to protect myself before I joined Virgil. Now I have many ways of doing it so overall I feel a lot safer when I'm in the ring," he explained.
"It's for me to then blend in the violence that they want to see and do it where I'm protected as a person as well. Because boxing doesn't care about the individual. You're just there to put on a show then you go home. Some people leave that show, leaving a part of themselves in the ring.
"How you win and stuff like that is important. We love the knockout reels and everything. As a person and as a 'commodity' wanting to get bigger, we know that draws attention so we've got to do both.
"You are there to entertain, but you have a job to do," he continued. "Get the job done. The job first and foremost is always to win."
