“It wasn’t my best performance but I’m not going to make excuses,” the Briton told iFL TV. “I’ve had a good training camp and I’ve got no one to blame. It was a tough fight and I had to work hard to win it. Yes, I performed below average, but I don’t want to belittle my opponent – you’re only as good as your opponent allows you to be. That’s a fact.”
“It’s by no means about underestimating your opponent. If I had listened to the press and the so-called experts who said this was an easy fight for me, I wouldn’t have won it. I trained for 12 weeks and prepared as well as I could. We didn’t know how good Francis was. We had no records, we hadn’t seen him fight as a boxer, and he was an even more uncomfortable opponent than I thought. He didn’t move forward, he counter-attacked, and I give him credit – he performed better than any other boxer in the last decade. This was probably my toughest fight in years.”
“Like I said, I have no one to blame but myself. No coach, no manager, no corner men – just myself. It’s a fighting game, these things happen. On the other hand, I’ve earned well, and my next fight will be for the absolute world title. So it’s not all that bad.”
Earlier, the promoter of “Gypsy King”, Frank Warren, reported that the fight between his ward and Ukrainian Alexander Usik, which will determine the absolute world heavyweight boxing champion, has been postponed from December 23 to early next year.