Anthony Joshua was knocked down twice in the opening round by Kristian Prenga before rallying back to knock his rival out in the second stanza09:14, 28 Jul 2026Kristian Prenga's manager has downplayed talk of foul play in the Albanian's defeat to Anthony Joshua, but claims his star client was ill two weeks before the Saudi showdown.Joshua was back in action this past weekend for the first time since being involved in a tragic car crash which resulted in the death of close friends Latif Ayodele and Sina Ghami. A win in Jeddah for the former two-time heavyweight champion would finally earn him a date with Tyson Fury - after the 'Gypsy King' won his warm-up fight against Mariusz Wach'AJ' nearly saw a fight with Fury snatched away from him after he was dropped twice in the opening round by Prenga, before rallying back in the second to stop his Albanian rival in Jeddah. Fans immediately started to scratch their heads as Prenga looked a completely different fighter in the second round.There have since been whispers of outside influences, but Prenga's manager Keith Sullivan has denied all the conspiracy theories, and revealed the heavyweight scrapper was ill in the build-up to the clash. Speaking to talkSPORT, presenter Ade Oladipo asked Sullivan to adress all the theories - to which he answered: "We can clear those up very easily in one word, impossible. There were two conspiracies. One was that Turki (Alalshikh) had come over to our corner...FOLLOW OUR FIGHTING FB PAGE! Latest boxing and MMA news, analysis and much more via our dedicated Facebook page"You were there, Ade, Turki was not even in Jeddah, so that never happened. That's gone, throw it away. The other conspiracy was that somebody from Sela or Matchroom had come and whispered in our corner. Look at the footage, that never happened. I'll tell you what happened, and this is the first time I'm mentioning this, this is the first time anybody from Team Prenga is mentioning this, and we had no intention of ever discussing this."I had a little team meeting on a conference call this morning and I felt that, because of the conspiracy theories that were floating, I had to go down this road and I didn't want to go down this round because... Everybody I deal with in boxing, I'm a person that believes in responsibility and accountability, and accept the outcome of things, and we do."It was at this point that Sullivan made a rather stunning revelation that Prenga was ill and unable to spar in the weeks leading up to the Joshua fight. "But, what happened here was Kristian had gotten very sick leading up to the fight. He didn't spar or train for two weeks before he got to Jeddah," he continued."He had a 102 (degrees Fahrenheit) fever and he was in bed for eight days straight... he moved camp over to Dubai, he brought a doctor in, drew some blood to make sure there wasn't something more serious going on."They said he was just run down and they thought it was a flu or cold, or something, and he would get over it. It took 14 days, so we had the last seven days before we went to Jeddah for training. We had a sparring partner there in Dubai who we didn't use at all... we couldn't get him out of bed to go for a walk."In the first round, he came out and just gassed himself out. The instructions in the corner for the second round were, 'Continue what you're doing, keep the pressure on, keep pumping the jab and when you have the opportunities, take him'. Kristian stood up off the stool to start, when that bell rang for the second round, and he said to me he felt like he was back in that bed that he was in for eight days, when he was gasping for air and had no energy."He concluded: "But, there was no... again, I'm not making excuses, I think it was the most exciting five-and-a-half minutes of boxing that I've witnessed in a very long time."