Anthony Joshua vs Joseph Parker is a real contest with a rare shot at total unification at stake

In 1993 an outdoor heavyweight title fight in Cardiff was at the very centre of the boxing universe when Lennox Lewis beat the resistance out of a bloody Frank Bruno to retain his world title.

They each staggered from the ring in the permanent drizzle, setting a high level of expectancy, suffering and humility in championship boxing for the big lads, and leaving enough behind to guarantee that nobody in the crowd of 30,000 will ever forget the night. It took place at the National Stadium, since demolished to make way for the Principality Stadium and that is where Anthony Joshua and Joseph Parker will meet on Saturday night in a fight from the sport’s lost days.

Over 80,000 will illuminate the sloping banks at the stadium with their twinkling display of lights when Parker and Joshua enter the ring, accompanied by their handlers carefully bearing the four belts that will be the secondary prize for the winner.

They are both unbeaten champions and the real test is the basic struggle in the ring, a fight to find a winner; the possession of a shimmering bauble, handed out by the latest in a seemingly endless line of fine-suited slicksters, is just part of the surround sound. The mission is victory and not the retention of a piece of costume jewellery and nobody cares or can remember what belt Lewis took home that night so many years ago. Nobody will forget the ferocity of the finish and Bruno’s limp body.

It will be Joshua’s third consecutive fight in a stadium, taking his live numbers to just over 250,000 people in 11 months. I doubt any heavyweight champion has ever fought in front of more people in such a short period. It is unlikely 40,000 watched Parker’s last three world title fights and Big Joe has his followers.

“There is no denying that Joshua is a massive star but this is not a popularity contest,” said Parker, a New Zealander with Samoan heritage who trains in isolation in Las Vegas. He enters the ring with topless Samoan men chanting a special haka and dressed with accessories of ancestry like the feathers of extinct birds and whale bones. There will be a nationwide day of prayer in Samoa when he fights and in New Zealand it is expected to get messy in pubs at dawn.

Joshua enters the ring as the new saviour of a division he has helped drag back from its icy, controlled, often brutal but more often dull exile in Eastern Europe. The clinical stranglehold of the Klitschko brothers finally ended last April with Wladimir terribly cut, on the canvas and then retiring from a sport he dominated for a decade. It was Big Josh in the opposite corner that night, thrilling 90,000 at Wembley and recreating a slugfest from the Seventies or Eighties, a period he adores and envies.

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It was less than a year ago, but too many have forgotten just how close Joshua was to defeat, forgotten those moments when it looked like the old man would win the truly desperate struggle. Joshua wonderfully silenced the people doubting his chin, desire and stamina and left the ring a genuine star that night in what was just his 19th professional fight. In heavyweight championship terms he remains a novice.

However, Joshua is beatable, far from a finished product and that is constantly overlooked in the devoted drive to please, to promote and to create a great fighter with a global image. “I’m getting there,” Joshua admitted last week in Sheffield, which would look nice as a footnote on one of the thousands of billboards across the country with Joshua’s face peddling a product.

Parker is undefeated in 24 fights, two years younger, an inch or two shorter and a few pounds lighter. He delivers the WBO belt to the table, which is a belt that meant very little when Lewis unified the three older, more established, but by no means better belts in 1999; Joshua and Parker have their eyes on some type of total unification, but even Muhammad Ali had to share the heavyweight title in the Sixties with a couple of men that few knew then and nobody remembers now.

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“Belts are nice, but this fight is about more than that,” said Parker. I’m sure Joshua would agree.

Between now and Saturday’s first bell the merchants of hype will do their best to create future fights for Joshua. The Cardiff arrival of Deontay Wilder, the unbeaten WBC champion, on a one-man salvation mission on behalf of heavyweight fisticuffs in America will be unintentionally comical.

Wilder has come for Joshua but will have to duck, dive and try to avoid Brixton’s Dillian Whyte, who is his outstanding challenger. Whyte knocked out lumbering Aussie Lucas Browne in round six at the O2 on Saturday night to put extra pressure on Wilder and his agenda ministers; Browne went down face first, was out cold and was then taken to hospital, had a brain scan and was, thankfully, cleared. The Whyte wins means that he is the number one contender, Joshua a champion and Tyson Fury, expected back in June, the lineal champion in tubby recess. It’s a rare British trinity, the type we expect in darts, but not in a sport dominated for a century by the leviathans of America.

The American broadcasters HBO, once the undisputed kings of heavyweight boxing coverage, sent a full squad to cover Whyte’s win and in over 30 years at ringside I can only remember that happening a couple of times during the regal days of Lewis, the great monarch of British boxing.

Wilder, you see, is an American attraction now, has knocked out 39 of his 40 victims and him fighting Joshua could break all financial records; Whyte, however, will not play the pet heavyweight in this scheme without screaming. Forget Whyte, Parker could also ruin the money dream and that is what makes this a really special week.