Eddie Hearn On Fury Stalling Joshua Talks- We Are Quite Baffled

Thursday morning came the latest in the back and forth publicly between WBC heavyweight champ Tyson Fury and the promoter for his proposed opponent Anthony Joshua about their possible December bout. And, Eddie Hearn made it clear that they’ve agreed in principle to the bout, but they can’t understand what Fury is doing.

The Matchroom Boxing promoter released a statement to Sky Sports in the U.K. expressing his dismay with the “Gypsy King” being non-committal about fighting the former unified champ Joshua,

Eddie Hearn says he has been left "baffled" by Tyson Fury's "unrealistic" deadlines, and urged the fighter to allow the two sides to keep working on setting up the fight 🥊 pic.twitter.com/ejbPt3rALG

— Sky Sports Boxing (@SkySportsBoxing) September 29, 2022

“I don’t want to get involved with the back and forths that are going to negatively impact this fight being made, but to be quite honest, we are quite baffled by the situation. Firstly, when we agreed to terms for the fight, it took us over a week to receive a draft contract. We have not had that contract for 14 days,” Hearn told Sky.

Over the next week, we’ve worked tirelessly and had a number of meetings with Queensberry to get the contract in some kind of decent shape. Last Monday we sent our final draft of the contract to Queensberry, only to see that Tyson Fury had publicly pulled out of the fight and it was no longer on the table…

You can’t publicly keep pulling out of a fight and then, restart negotiations when there has been so many positive conversations had.”

As we have written recently, Fury has continually waffled about wanting to fight Joshua on a proposed date of December 3rd in Cardiff, Wales.

This after the biggest and most appealing fight with the unbeaten, WBA/IBF/WBO champ Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed title appears unlikely. This is because Usyk wants to take significant time off.

Usyk has just beaten Joshua in August for the second time in less than 12 months and the appeal of Fury-Joshua has also been lessened ,because with the two losses to the Ukranian and his disastrous TKO loss to American Andy Ruiz in June 2019, Joshua has lost three of his last five fights.

Joshua also behaved oddly after the August Usyk fight, as he fought off tears, stormed out of the ring initially before returning to take the mic and take away from Usyk’s win by rambling on and on to the crowd in Saudi Arabia. So, it may very well be that Fury and Warren see opportunity to beat a damaged Joshua and get paid heftily to do it.

Still, the fight would have massive box office appeal in the U.K. and on pay per view there. Yet, at the end of September, there’s still not an agreement.

Our Dan Rafael wrote earlier this week that Fury could fight aged, journeyman Mahmoud Charr in December, but that suggestion has been met with ridicule and skepticism that it’s only being used to publicly leverage against Joshua in negotiations.

Fury, 32-0-1, just made his second successful title defense back in April in front of a U.K. record 94,000+ fans at Wembley Stadium. That night he dispatched contender Dillian Whyte with a huge uppercut KO in the seventh round.

And, whether he’s going to fight Joshua or fight someone else, it looks as though Fury is intent to be back in the ring against someone in December.