Anthony Joshua Stops Jake Paul In Round 6 In Miami

Anthony Joshua brought a certain adult supervision to the latest circus in boxing’s big top, stopping Jake Paul in the sixth round at Miami’s Kaseya Center after four earlier knockdowns in a fight that spent as long flirting with farce as it did with danger. It was scheduled for eight three-minute rounds, fought in 10oz gloves, streamed live on Netflix, and for the first half, it had all the warmth of a cold shower: plenty of noise, not much clean connection.

Paul’s plan was obvious and, for a while, irritatingly effective. He circled hard to his left, stayed just beyond Joshua’s jab, and threw little touches to the body to remind everyone he was still participating. The price of that safety-first approach was entertainment, and the crowd made that clear. Joshua, the heavier man by some distance and the one with the proper heavyweight pedigree, stalked in straight lines early, pawed at range, and swung too big when the smaller target slipped away. The result was four rounds of pursuit, clinches, and the kind of missed right hands that make a big man look like he’s shadowboxing in a hurricane.

The numbers underlined how scrappy the first half really was. Through four rounds, Joshua had thrown 69 punches and landed 14; Paul had thrown only 28 and landed 10. That is not a typographical error; it is what happens when one man is trying to hit, and the other is trying not to be hit, and neither is doing much else. The contest was threatening to become less “prizefight” and more “cardio demonstration”, with Joshua’s frustration growing in plain sight as he struggled to pin Paul down for anything more than a brief exchange.

Then, in the fifth, the fight finally turned into what everyone had paid to see: a heavyweight punching a smaller man who could no longer keep the exits unlocked. Joshua began finding Paul with the kind of shots that don’t need explanation—an uppercut as Paul fell in, a hard right as he tried to slide away—and suddenly Paul’s legs started telling on him. He hit the canvas twice in the round, both times taking a knee under pressure, both times getting up with the look of a man doing quick sums and not liking the answer. The bell spared him, but it didn’t rescue him. It merely postponed the obvious.

The sixth was a short walk to the end. Paul went down again early in the round as Joshua’s pressure tightened and the punches arrived in heavier clusters. There was still a flash of the showman—Paul sticking his tongue out at one point, as if bravado might function as a mouthguard—but the posture couldn’t hide the damage. Joshua, now landing with increasing ease, poured on a sustained attack, thudding to the body and finishing upstairs with the right hand. When Paul went down for the fourth time, the referee stepped in to end it, a merciful conclusion to a mismatch that had finally stopped pretending it wasn’t one. The official time of the stoppage was 1:31 of round six.

For Joshua, it was the expected result, though perhaps not the smoothest route to it: he had to wade through the early running, the holding, the awkwardness, and a first half that asked uncomfortable questions about rhythm and sharpness. But when he found the range, he answered the only question that mattered with heavyweight certainty. Paul deserves credit for getting in there, for trying to survive at a weight where men hit differently, and for repeatedly beating counts that most sensible people would have avoided altogether. Yet once Joshua began landing clean, the gap in class and punching authority was as wide as the Atlantic.