Anthony Joshua survives two first-round knockdowns to stop Prenga in the second, Fury deal holds

Anthony Joshua was on the canvas twice inside the first three minutes. He walked out of the Jeddah Superdome with his 27th career knockout and the signed Fury contract still waiting on the other side.

Joshua stopped Kristian Prenga by second-round TKO at 2:43 of the round in the main event on July 25, 2026, headlining a DAZN pay-per-view card from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The finish moves Joshua to 30-4 with 27 knockouts. Prenga drops to 20-2 with 20 knockouts.

The result is what the promotion needed, and the road to it did not disappoint.

Prenga came in 20-1 with 20 knockouts and no career decisions on his ledger, an Albanian puncher out of Edgewater, New Jersey, riding a fourteen-fight winning streak into his biggest assignment. He weighed 261.4 to Joshua’s 251. His most recent bout was a first-round TKO of Joe Jones at Showboat Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City in February. He had not shared a ring with an opponent carrying Joshua’s size, speed, and pedigree at once.

He fought like it. Prenga caught Joshua with a right uppercut nineteen seconds into the first round and put the former unified heavyweight champion on the floor. Joshua got up and looked recovered on his feet, then walked into a barrage later in the same round and touched the canvas a second time. For a stretch of two minutes, the entire Joshua comeback and the entire Q4 Fury deal were one bad exchange from over.

Yahoo Sports summarised it plainly. Prenga demonstrated with a single punch that over-marination of a fight is very real. Sometimes it is better just to book the damned thing.

Round two changed the tone completely. Joshua found the range behind the jab, planted the lead foot, walked Prenga onto a right hand, and closed the show. Prenga went down under a sustained combination and the referee waved it off at 2:43. The finish was decisive. The concerns raised by the opening round did not evaporate. They just moved to the training-camp file.

The Fury deal

The whole night existed because of what is inked behind it. Promoter Eddie Hearn confirmed at the post-fight press conference that Fury vs. Joshua is signed for Q4 2026 in the United Kingdom, streaming live on Netflix and backed financially by General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki Alalshikh. A Joshua loss on Saturday would have collapsed the whole structure. A messy win still counts as a win.

Fury did his half of the tune-up work on Friday, stopping Mariusz Wach in Thailand. He absorbed some warning shots of his own in doing it. The Q4 fight now has two heavyweights walking into camp with genuine reasons to be cautious about each other, and that is a meaningfully different marketing conversation than the one either promoter would have wanted before Saturday.

Joshua leaned into the theatre at the presser. Channelling Mike Tyson, he called Fury out directly and delivered a verbal tirade that borrowed heavily from the Brooklyn heavyweight’s greatest hits. It played to the room. It also served a purpose. The fight now has its selling point beyond the belts and the payday. There is genuine needle.

The Technical Read

The technical read on Saturday is worth being honest about. The knockdowns were not flash counters or freak shots. Prenga walked Joshua down and caught him with clean punches down the pipe. Joshua’s guard was high but his feet were square, and against a fighter with a 100 percent knockout ratio that is a problem. The adjustment in the second, planting the lead foot, working behind the jab, timing the counter right, is the version of Joshua that stopped Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley in 2017. It comes and goes. Fury will have seen both rounds.

Fury is not Prenga. Fury will not walk in straight lines. The awkward orthodox-to-southpaw switching, the tie-ups, the pace changes across twelve rounds, are a fundamentally different puzzle than a heavyweight puncher looking for one shot. Whichever team leads Joshua’s camp into the fall will spend the run-up dissecting Saturday frame by frame. So will Fury’s corner.

The Undercard

The rest of the DAZN card produced its own headlines. Hamzah Sheeraz retained his WBO super middleweight title by majority decision over Simon Zachenhuber in a close tactical fight that drew boos from the Jeddah crowd. Judges scored it 115-113 and 116-112 for Sheeraz. One judge had it 114-114. Sheeraz keeps the belt, but his stock takes a hit. Reito Tsutsumi finished Alvino Herrera by second-round TKO after scoring three knockdowns, moving to 5-0 with four knockouts. Josh Kelly beat Caoimhin Agyarko on the cards. Jacob Bank shut out Pawel August 80-72 across all three scorecards at super middleweight.

The Bigger Picture

For one night the ledger is simple. Two knockdowns absorbed, one delivered, one heavyweight showdown two decades in the making finally has its date. Joshua left the ring with blood in his mouth and a fight on his calendar.

Fury is next. The date will land in the fall. The fight will land on Netflix. What will land in the ring is what Joshua and his corner spend the next several months trying to sort out.