Shane McGuigan believes it was a mistake on the part of Daniel Dubois’ management team to match him up against the far more experienced IBF, WBA & WBO heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk last Saturday night in Wroclaw, Poland.
Shane feels that Dubois’ team gambled with his career, hoping he’d pull off a win so they could match him against Tyson Fury in a big money fight in Saudi Arabia in early 2024. The gamble failed big time, with Uysk (21-0, 14 KOs) knocking the 25-year-old Dubois (19-2, 18 KOs) in the ninth round.
Now, instead of owning the loss, Dubois’ management plans on trying to appeal to the sanctioning bodies to have the result changed to a no-contest or a rematch ordered based on a blow knockdown that occurred in the fifth.
McGuigan thinks that it was a bad move to let Dubois take the fight with Usyk after Daniel’s last contest against Kevin Lerena, a bout in which he was dropped three times in the first round and suffered a knee injury that required surgery to fix.
“I would have forced a much smaller ring and been on the referee a lot more,” said Shane McGuigan to Boxing King Media about what he would have done if he’d been Daniel Dubois’ trainer for the Oleksandr Usyk fight.
It probably wouldn’t have mattered if Dubois had forced the fight to have been a close-quarters contest because he didn’t have the stamina or the punch resistance to brawl with Usyk.
As we saw with the weak punches from Usyk that put Dubois down in rounds eight and nine, he can’t take a halfway decent shot.
“If I were managing Daniel, I would have never wanted that fight for him. He’s 25 years of age,” said McGuigan. “That was a fight that people wanted him to take it, wanting and wishing he’d won it with a shot so they could go make a load of money with Fury because they can control Daniel. They can’t control Usyk.”
Dubois” management made a foolhardy gamble with him, and now they have nothing to show for it. What’s worse is that Dubois’ self-confidence is likely at an all-time low because he knows he was put down easily by a guy with little power.
If Dubois can’t take Usyk’s shots, what will he do when or if he gets in with fighters like Deontay Wilder or Anthony Joshua?
“All along, we knew what the focus was. Really, you got to look at the person,” said Shane. “He had knee surgery; he got dropped three times [by Kevin Lerena]. Even though one of them was a legitimate shot, he got dropped two more times after that.
“He got up, pulled a fantastic shot out of the bag, and was injured at the end of it and showed lots of mettle to get through that first round against Lerena and overturn it. But your confidence is down. You’re going in there with a new knee and all those types of things.
“It was never aligned in his favor, going out to Poland in front of all those [Ukrainian] fans. It just wasn’t the right move to take that fight, in my opinion. But they gambled to be great, and it didn’t pay off for them.
“The Usyk fight is different. The whole team is convincing themselves that it was the right thing to do, and that’s when it’s normally not the right thing to do.
“Hopefully, he can come again. He can learn from that,” said Shane about Dubois. “You got to look at it the right way to learn from it. You can’t just have your head down. We’ll see how he comes back from this.”
