Anthony Joshua vs Joseph Parker: David Price knows odds are stacked against him against Alexander Povetkin

Less than an hour before the main event in Cardiff on Saturday night David Price will walk to the ring as a sacrificial lamb for a fight he is not meant to win against Russia’s Alexander Povetkin.

Price is the lost and sad man of British heavyweight boxing and he is in a fight that is as cruel and calculating as I can ever remember. Povetkin is expected to win and then fight Anthony Joshua at some point this year and Price is expected to make Povetkin look good and get knocked out. It is a brutal plan, but Price has been in uglier places than the ring he will enter on Saturday when he goes in search of the most unlikely redemption.

Price’s boxing nightmares have happened, there were horrible fights in front of capacity crowds in his beloved Liverpool, his family screaming at ringside and his promoter, manager and friend Frank Maloney choking as the heavyweight crashed viciously from the heights of an unforgiving division. He was, we wrote and hoped, two or three fights away from getting at one of the Klitschko brothers, he was the dangerous fighter in a division gone stale, the one blessed with the sickening right hand; Joshua testified to the power, admitted Price dropped him in sparring. It is too easy to forget where Price was in early 2013, he was unbeaten in 15 with 13 ending quick and at that time he was the outstanding contender at heavyweight anywhere in the world.

Then sometime in late 2012 he signed to meet the American Tony Thompson in Liverpool at the Echo Arena in February 2013. Thompson had fought Wladimir Klitschko in his previous fight, losing when the IBO, IBF, WBA and WBO titles were the trophy. It took Big Wlad six, Pricey fancied he could do it quicker and he probably would have. Looking back the Thompson fight was a lunatic risk.

Price got hit on the ear, his legs and head went and it was stopped in the second round inside a silenced Echo Arena. Price had been in total control, disrespectful in some ways of Thompson and was handling the giant American with ease. A rematch was arranged for July and there were immediately mixed messages from inside the Price camp. There was a suggestion that the loss was an accident waiting to happen and not a shock, the result of a freak punch on the ear.

“It was not a great time but I went into the second fight with Thompson confident,” said Price. “I kept thinking that in a year or two we will all look back on the loss and think nothing of it. I was convinced it was nothing serious, just a little setback.”

In the rematch Thompson was dropped heavily in round two and I still maintain he was over for a lot longer than 10 seconds. It was, it turns out, Price’s lost golden moment, Thompson survived the round and in the fifth round Price was saved, on his feet but desolate in a corner. It all looked over for Big Pricey and seldom have I seen a man so crushed by defeat. Maloney sobbed at ringside.

However, there was an odd moment of relief when it was announced Thompson had failed a post-fight drug test after the rematch, he had used a serious masking agent, a banned substance. It was, as I said, a tiny speck of distant hope for Price. The two defeats remain, the shattered career of the innocent boxer is not improved by the guilt of the dirty fighter and that is something that the sanctioning bodies could very well look at in the future.

The genuine contender had toppled from the rankings and that night he was left bewildered in a corner looking at something in a future that had just been ruined. He put a few wins together, still looked nervous and then was knocked out cold in the summer of 2015 by Erkan Teper. After that loss it was revealed that Teper had also failed a drug test for an illegal substance. Teper, like Thompson, was banned but Price gained nothing from the exiles of the men that took away his unbeaten record, his dream and some might say his confidence.

The dark nights followed the Teper knockout. Price was pushed to the edge, looked broken when glimpsed, but a couple of quick wins in 2016 suddenly transformed him and he was on the lips of champions. Deals were so nearly struck for fights with Joseph Parker for the WBO title and Joshua for two other belts late in 2016. They each collapsed, Price was rejected because of his right hand and a year ago he was beaten again, exhausted and short of answers on that occasion. It is no secret in boxing that Joshua’s people selected the roly-poly Eric Molina for their December 2016 fight to reduce the risk of a loss because Joshua was tired from a hard year: Molina melted in three rounds, Wladimir climbed in the ring to seal his fight with Joshua - Price might have just ruined the stage-managed endgame.

“I have been selected by Povetkin to lose, I know that,” said Price. “I’m here to make him look good but I got a feeling when I accepted this fight, a strange feeling that something will happen. I’m not here for sacrifice, I have everything to lose and that makes me dangerous.”

Price has that most elusive and necessary of assets for a heavyweight in his right hand and that single punch can change everything. Povetkin is fighting a desperate man, but not necessarily a man ready just yet for boxing’s murky scrapheap.