The Great British Box Up – AJ v Fury Has More Spats Than Punches

After years of semi regular and annual ‘will they, won’t they, just please get it over with’ – Boxing fans finally thought that we would now get an answer to what many have now stopped caring about. The long awaited Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua all British heavyweight clash.

Almost as soon as it was set the more recent rumblings behind the scenes that had delayed it, focusing mainly on would it be a nationally hosted event for loyal fans, or the modern day glitzy, showy, pointless foreign money spinner, resurfaced and there seemed to be newer reasons to throw the encounter into jeopardy. The out of ring handbags are not building up the fight, or the tension, or the interest. If it takes place in Cardiff it will be a sell out for sure, but with every passing day it becomes less relevant than before. The fight we wanted was during their peak, when it mattered for the belts, not now as a retirement run for the broadcast streamers.

A list of all Irish betting sites would have given future reasons why the fight would stall again, and stealing the headlines of late is the spat between Matchroom’s Eddie Hearn and UFC president Dana White, as neither want to work with the other, and there are claims of ‘breach of contract’ being thrown around because of their involvements. It is all a bit childish, and actually very, very fitting of the nonsense surrounding the potential fight that we have seen down the years.

Naturally Fury is front and centre, and merely only a matter of weeks after he tried to end the Joshua fight and set up a rematch with (now trainer) Oleksandr Usyk and subtly get the often spoken about United States Trilogy match between the pair off the ground, he is now saying that Hearn is the problem and it is because of his ‘ego’.

Hearn for himself has stated categorically that White ‘cannot be involved’ and that Netflix have to stand by the contracts, and now we have White on record as saying ‘I don’t know’ if the fight will happen either.

Even by boxing standards – or the lack thereof where theatre and social media ‘likes’ in the modern production world seem to now actually be more important than real tests of skill, bravery, stamina and resilience in the ring itself – this is more schoolyard than a fight for the ages.

For the more traditional fan, the heavyweight category had long slipped into the realms of scripted reality television where clippable moments of faux style over substance, were now the norm. The division and schedule management to suit the cash cows had largely become a parody of itself already when you consider the true greats and Lion’s of the Ring that we have all been treated to. It just seems that it has finally been confirmed that utterly irrelevant people in charge now think they are more important than the fighters that remain.

At least Don King was colourful and slightly entertaining, and he quite clearly had his flaws (to put it politely), but Rumble in the Jungle just would not have been the same had fans had to wait 45 years for it to actually take place – and this one will not be now, even if it finally happens because people remember the money involved in it.

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