Tyson Fury returns with vulnerability and teaches Anthony Joshua a valuable lesson

Arslanbek Makhmudov recently caught the attention of the boxing world by wrestling a bear in Dagestan . And from the first round on Saturday night, he seemed to realise that wrestling Tyson Fury was a better option than boxing him. Yet on this occasion, that’s no comment on the wizardry that Fury can produce in the ring, but rather on Makhmudov’s flaws.

The story of this fight was that, luckily for Fury, those flaws eclipsed the Briton’s own, increasingly-apparent faults . This wasn’t the triumphant return of the “Gypsy King”, see, but an underwhelming – perhaps even concerning – return to the ring from the former world heavyweight champion, as he emerged from his fifth retirement. Sixteen months on from his second defeat by Oleksandr Usyk, Fury was back; three-and-a-half years after his last fight on home soil, he was back in Britain.

The goal of this points win over Makhmudov was to set up a long-overdue duel with compatriot Anthony Joshua , who watched on from the front row, and while that contest still gets the juices flowing (just), Fury’s performance here did not. Tyson Fury after beating Arslanbek Makhmudov on points (Getty Images for Netflix) In the cold shell of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, before a smattering of empty seats, Makhmudov came forward in laboured movements, hurling overhands that Fury could see coming before his opponent had even dreamed them up. Yet one early entry did trouble Fury enough to elicit an echoing “ooh!

” from the stands, as a right hand connected over the top. Early in the second round, there was also a nervy movement for Fury, who was arguably backing up too frequently in a passive start. Maybe there was an element of the 37-year-old simply wishing to stay mobile and remote from Makhmudov in the earliest rounds, in which the Russian is at his most dangerous, but Fury was doing little besides throwing sporadic jabs to the body.