Don Charles has dismissed suggestions that Daniel Dubois is on the verge of confronting the world’s finest fighter.
On Saturday at Stadion Wroclaw in Wroclaw, Poland, in his highest-profile and most difficult fight the 25-year-old Dubois challenges Oleksandr Usyk for the IBF, WBA and WBO heavyweight titles.
After winning the undisputed cruiserweight title and then moving to heavyweight to twice defeat the revered Anthony Joshua, Usyk became widely recognised as the finest fighter in the world.
In the same week last month Naoya Inoue and Terence Crawford produced career-best performances to respectively stop Stephen Fulton and Errol Spence and therefore challenge that status, but even before then the experienced Charles wasn’t convinced that it was justified, and revealed that he considered preparing Derek Chisora to fight the Klitschko brothers a considerably more “intimidating” task.
“Across the board, you’re looking at ‘Canelo' [Saul Alvarez],” said Charles, working with Dubois for the first time. “It was [Vasyl] Lomachenko until age caught up with him; Terence Crawford, most definitely. [Oleksandr] Usyk is up there. Obviously he has to be up there.
“I’ve been here before. What is daunting is when you’ve been commissioned to fight Wladimir Klitschko. Then his bigger brother [Vitali] stepped in – he was a killer. He was brutalising everybody. Derek gave him the hardest fight since Lennox Lewis [in 2003]. The size of the Klitschkos; Usyk’s a masterful skilful boxer; he has a lot of tricks. His ring IQ is incredible. But he’s not a monster. He’s not a concussive, one-punch merchant.
