Anthony Joshua has a new trainer for Oleksandr Usyk rematch

Anthony Joshua started training with Mike Tyson’s former coach Ronnie Shields ahead of his rematch against Oleksandr Usyk. AJ lost his WBA, WBO, IBF and IBO heavyweight titles last month as Usyk secured a unanimous decision victory. After his defeat, Joshua and his current head trainer Rob McCracken have received criticism for their approach to the fight against Usyk. 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."

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