Francis Ngannou doesn’t remember getting up from the stool to start the second round of his boxing match with Anthony Joshua.
After delivering a show-stealing performance against Tyson Fury in October, Ngannou returned to Kingdom Arena in Riyadh for a clash with the WBC’s top-ranked contender. Intent on earning his way into a rematch with ‘The Gypsy King’ Ngannou instead faced an almost immediate disaster when he was sat down in the opening round with a straight right hand from his opponent.
Ngannou answered the referee’s count and made it through the remainder of the round, but according to the former UFC heavyweight champion, everything after that knockdown was a blur.
“My memory and my vision kept going,” Ngannou said while speaking to Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour. “I don’t remember when I came back from the stool to go to the second round. From the stool, in between rounds, I wasn’t there anymore. Some days are just not your day and you can’t explain what happened. It was quite weird.”
Francis Ngannou Says third boxing fight might come before PFL debut
Ngannou suffered a second knockdown in the second round before being finished off with a massive right hand that rendered the Cameroonian unconscious.
Despite the setback, Ngannou appears to be far from done in the sweet science. Recently, he suggested that boxing now “owes him something” and that a third fight inside the ring could take precedence over his long-awaited debut inside the PFL Smart Cage.
“What’s next for me? Maybe a third boxing match,” Ngannou said on his YouTube channel. “But I think now boxing owes me something now. I have to regain what boxing took from me. I think my ego will not let me step back and let this go like this without doing everything to restore and prove to the world that I’m the man for the job, I can do it. I slipped, but I didn’t fall. I stumbled, I didn’t fall.”