BIG Joe Joyce returns to the ring tonight at Wembley Arena in what has all the makings of a shootout against Carlos Takam.

At a time when England finds itself blessed with an abundance of world-class heavyweights, Joyce has found himself the victim of being grievously underappreciated. The 35-year-old, having only turned pro in 2017, has already racked up an impressive record of 12 wins in 12 fights with 11 victories by KO. In his last fight he forced the much-fancied prospect Daniel Dubois to retire with a fractured orbital, and is now knocking on the door of a world-title shot.

Takam is now all who stands between Joyce and that title shot in the form of a mandatory slot with the WBO, which would place him in line to face either Anthony Joshua or Oleksandr Usyk depending on which of the two emerges victorious when they meet on September 25 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London.

What Joyce and his team can’t be criticised for is taking a tune-up fight in advance of Joshua-Usyk, with the aforesaid mandatory slot on the line. Takam is as fierce as they come in the division outside the top five. At 40 he carries impressive speed and fights with blowtorch intensity to go with the decent though not concussive power he carries in both hands. Further still, the 6’1” French-Cameroonian never comes into a fight in anything less than top shape.

At 6’6” Joyce enjoys significant height and weight advantage, though this is offset by Takam’s longer reach — 80.5 to Joyce’s 80 inches — at a level where small margins such as these are often the difference between victory and defeat. Takam has superior hand speed and is that rare animal among today’s heavyweights in that he throws punches in bunches. It dictates that an interesting night beckons if he can get inside Joyce’s jab.

Speaking of which, Joyce’s jab is no ordinary weapon, even by heavyweight division standards. This he proved against the aforementioned Dubois. Like a human pneumatic drill, the giant Londoner kept it in Dubois’s face over the course of a fight in which he hardly threw his backhand. In the end Dubois was forced to take a knee in the tenth, prior to being whisked off to hospital for an operation to repair the damage to his cheekbone.

That Joyce distributed this kind of damage with a jab only is a frightening thing of beauty to behold.

A latter-day George Foreman who moves around a ring with the same destructive intent and precisely like the juggernaut he’s adopted as his ring name, Joyce is justifiably the favourite going in given his perfect record and higher KO percentage. This is not to suggest that Joyce has no weaknesses. He has the tendency to stand square and is available to be hit, which against any of the giants in the division renders him vulnerable.

Takam is not one of those giants, but his greater experience demands respect, as does the rare brand of unbridled aggression and determination he brings to his work — emphatically demonstrated against Derek Chisora over the course of their eight-round war in 2018. Chisora emerged the battered and bruised victor in that contest, knocking out a man who until then had been all over him like an octopus that hadn’t eaten in weeks.

Regardless of the result tonight, it will be refreshing to see the drama in heavyweight boxing return to the ring where it belongs, rather than continue to dominate proceedings outside the ring as it has these last few weeks and months.

Per one Winston Churchill, it will always remain a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, why Fury and his team felt emboldened to sign a contract to fight Joshua on August 14 before the outcome of the appeal lodged by Deontay Wilder’s legal team to uphold the latter’s rematch clause included in the contract for Fury-Wilder II.

Wilder won his appeal to leave Fury and, more importantly, his management and promotional team with their faces covered in egg. Hubris is folly at the best of times. When it comes at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and the money spent and lost by fans who made the mistake of forking out for flights, hotels and tickets, it takes on the character of madness.

Just to compound Team Fury’s run of misfortune of late was the news that Fury and others in his camp had tested positive for Covid, thus putting paid to his court-mandated third fight against Wilder on July 24 in Vegas. This fight will likely now take place sometime in late autumn or early winter.

The wider consequence is that the hugely anticipated and desired all-British clash between AJ and Fury has been kicked into the long grass, with no clear path to its resurrection in sight. In no other professional top-flight sport could such confusion and insanity be allowed to obtain. It bespeaks a culture within championship boxing in which too many promotional, legal and managerial chefs are allowed to spoil the proverbial broth.

For these reasons it is to be expected, and certainly hoped, that at Wembley Arena tonight, fans of the sport are reacquainted with the reasons for their love of it. Takam will have to be on his absolute A-game if he’s to weather the Joyce storm, while Joyce will have to be on his to avoid falling foul of the banana skin Takam presents.

George Foreman in his prime fought with fear in his head and rage in his heart. As the late great Hugh McIlvanney once said of him: “There seems only one way to beat George Foreman: shell him for three days and then send the infantry in.”

If Joyce really does draw comparison with Foreman, Takam and his team would be well advised to be lining up the artillery and organising the infantry as these words are being written.