Anthony Joshua spent nearly three minutes on the wrong end of a beating before he ever threw a serious punch back. Then he ended the night with one right hand.
Joshua stopped Kristian Prenga at 2:43 of the second round on Saturday at the Jeddah Superdome in Saudi Arabia, closing out “The Comeback” card with the kind of finish that erased a first round nobody in his corner expected. The 20-1 Albanian challenger, a late addition to the heavyweight scene with a perfect knockout ratio among his wins, dropped Joshua twice before the opening bell even rang.
Prenga’s right uppercut put Joshua down less than a minute into the fight. Joshua rose, absorbed more pressure against the ropes, and went down a second time when a follow-up right hand buckled him and his glove touched the canvas again before round one closed. Few in the building expected him to make it out of round two standing, let alone finish the job himself.
He did. Joshua reset behind his jab to open the second, found range, and dropped Prenga with a right hand that ended the fight at 2:43. The victory pushed Joshua’s record to 30-4 with 27 knockouts. Prenga, who had stopped every man he beat as a professional, fell to 20-2.
Prenga’s power was not a mystery going in. He had built his reputation on brutal finishes, including a stoppage of Juan Torres in which he dropped his opponent three times in the first round and twice more in the second before the fight was waved off, a pattern of first-round violence that nearly repeated itself against Joshua before the former unified champion turned it around.
Asked afterward about the fight now signed against Tyson Fury, Joshua reached for some theater first. “I’m going to rip his heart out,” he said, borrowing the line from Mike Tyson’s old pre-fight bravado before turning serious. “There are two sides to this thing,” he added. “I respect everything he has done and everything that he’s achieved.” Promoter Eddie Hearn has confirmed the contract for Joshua-Fury is signed for later in 2026, though a date and venue have yet to be announced.
The knockdowns will follow Joshua into that fight regardless of how well he finished. Fury has built entire training camps around exploiting exactly the kind of slow start Prenga nearly capitalized on, and Saturday gave him fresh film to study. For now, Joshua’s camp is left explaining a wobble against a fighter with one professional loss, even as the win itself, confirmed on the promotion’s own event page, sets up the fight British boxing has chased for the better part of a decade.
Joshua’s ability to absorb two knockdowns and still find a finish inside two rounds recalls another comeback that played out on a Playbook Wire heavyweight card, Abdullah Mason’s late-notice scare against Albert Bell, where a fighter written off mid-fight closed the show anyway. Joshua’s version took two rounds instead of twelve, and it came with a signed superfight waiting on the other side. The exact wording of his post-fight vow toward Fury was first reported by BoxingNews.com, which also confirmed the 2:43 stoppage time.
Whether Joshua can carry Saturday’s second-round composure into a full fight against Fury is the question Hearn now has to answer before a date gets announced. Prenga forced him to prove he still has some in him. Fury will ask for a lot more than that.
