Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua are still in the negotiation stages of a planned undisputed heavyweight championship fight, where Fury would defend the WBC ) titles, while Joshua would be putting up the WBA, IBF, and WBO belts.
Matchroom Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn said he recently spoke with Joshua, and that the fighter has been keeping sharp since his Dec. 12 win over Kubrat Pulev.
“He’s fantastic, he hasn’t stopped working since the Pulev fight,” he said. “He’s just loving boxing. He’s quite enjoying lockdown because he’s so robotic, really, at the moment in camp and with his approach.”
As far as Fury-Joshua goes, Hearn is where he’s been for a while now, which is to say they’re working on it and hope to have the bout finalized soon.
“We get asked every day, ‘How long, where’s it at?’ and all I can say is we’re finalizing the finer details. Nothing major that we see is gonna stop this fight from happening,” he stated. “As always, the plan has been to get both fighters to sign, announce it to the world, and then go and finalize the site details with all these approaches that we’ve had. I don’t want to go through that process without having these guys signed.”
As for getting to the point of finalizing a venue, Hearn called this a unique situation, not just in the scope of the fight but also because of the continuing COVID pandemic across the globe.
“It’s the biggest fight in boxing, one of the biggest fights of all time. The problem is, when you have a dozen site approaches from 15 different people, that job is quite, you know — it involves a lot of work to go out and start negotiating, putting time into escrow agreements, legal agreements, until a fight is actually done. And I don’t want to waste the time of those people until the fight is signed.
“A lot of the dates now depend on the COVID situation. Originally we wanted May, but we feel like June is a safer option. Different countries are at different stages. Some countries are in lockdown, some are open.”
Hearn named the same contenders we’ve heard about already — Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Qatar, and possibly Las Vegas if things open up and go well there — and also stressed he doesn’t think there’s any real concern about Fury-Joshua not coming next, and that they do not have a backup idea for AJ.
“I don’t know what we’d do if we didn’t fight Tyson Fury, to be honest with you,” he said. “Everyone is so focused to get this over the line. This is the fight, this is the moment, and you will get it.”
