'Day of Reckoning': Anthony Joshua fights Wallin, his doubters and his demons in Riyadh

Fight week invariably means trash talk and for Anthony Joshua, the jibes have started to become highly predictable – but no less cutting.

"Joshua is mentally fragile," says Otto Wallin, the man he faces in a make-or-break bout this Saturday night. "He's not sure of himself."

"I've always said Joshua is mentally weak," agreed Deontay Wilder, the brash American who takes on Joseph Parker as part of the same Saudi extravaganza, and will by all accounts be next for Joshua if both men are victorious.

Insults always sting the most when they contain an element of truth, and some observers would express sympathy for the view offered by Joshua's snippy heavyweight rivals.

In a recent BBC documentary, there was a revelatory moment shared between the unlikely trio of Joshua, his aunt, and the television presenter Louis Theroux. A fleeting intimacy between strangers, the type of which Theroux has made a career out of creating, where Joshua’s aunt prophesised her nephew reclaiming the heavyweight title for a third time.

Joshua half-heartedly parroted her words, eyes glazed, mind elsewhere, and in that moment, it was hard to believe that anyone had ever doubted themselves so profoundly.

You don’t need to a degree in sports psychology to see that the mental toll of Joshua’s journey has outweighed the physical; and it says a lot about the difficult second act of his career that he is indulging in such PR exercises.

Once the poster boy of British sport with a fame envied even within the gilded elite of the Premier League, conversations about Joshua are now more sombre affairs, met with a wince, a rueful shrug, and invariably the phrase: “He’s not been the same since …”