Tyson Fury may have won his comeback but he lost the moment to Anthony Joshua

Rarely has there ever been a staredown as intensely British as the awkward one top heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua shared on a world stage Saturday. As a socially-off English person myself, I kind of loved it. You can forget your afternoon tea, royal pageantry and your fish and chips — this is what we do best, people.

But in boxing, we can over-marinate a fight too, only to deliver a callout that spectacularly backfires when everyone is watching. It started more than a decade ago for Fury and Joshua, when the national rivals were first linked with one another while climbing the domestic ranks. Britain has produced a conveyor belt of heavyweight talent — from Lennox Lewis, Frank Bruno and David Haye, to more recent graduates like Fabio Wardley and Moses Itauma.

Fury and Joshua were a bridge from a previous generation to our current one, and it’s a travesty that they haven’t fought each other at least twice already. Saturday in London, they had another chance to enjoy the kind of cinematic payoff Jaron “Boots” Ennis provided when he stormed the ring after super welterweight rival Vergil Ortiz’s lightning-quick knockout win over Erickson Lubin late last year. Issues beyond the ropes put that superfight on the shelf when the fighters themselves had so whetted the public appetite, but Fury and Joshua could be made right now.

Today. And they could have generated for Netflix what “Boots” and Ortiz delivered for DAZN — an in-ring faceoff that provides the necessary momentum from one big-ticket event to the next. The scene could have generated a viral moment had it been done right.