With the news that Tyson Fury is now – once again – open to a fight with Anthony Joshua on December 3, ‘AJ’s team have responded to his latest demand.
Fans thought the all-British heavyweight title fight was dead in the water on Monday as ‘The Gypsy King’s deadline was missed. This morning, he changed his mind, giving Joshua another ultimatum – sign today or that is it. For real this time…
Following Fury’s re-entering of negotiations, Eddie Hearn has spoken out to say that public back and forths are counterproductive to the real conversations going on behind the scenes. He provided a statement to Sky Sports News.
“I don’t want to get involved with back and forths that are going to negatively impact this fight being made but to be honest we are quite baffled by the situation. Firstly, when we agreed terms to the fight it took us over a week to receive a draft contract, we have not had that contract for 14 days.
Over the next week, we worked tirelessly with Queensbury to get the contract in some kind of decent shape. Last Monday, we sent our final draft of the contract to Queensbury only to see that Tyson Fury had publicly pulled out of the fight and it was no longer on the table. Yesterday, we then received comments from Queensbury on our final draft of the agreement of which is now being reviewed.
I’m not sure why Tyson Fury keeps setting unrealistic deadlines whilst also offering the fight to a number of other heavyweights for the selected date. If he’s serious about the fight being made, I suggest he allows Matchroom and Queensbury to keep working hard to make the fight of which everyone has been trying to do.
You can’t publicly keep pulling out of a fight and then restart negotiations when there have been so many positive conversations had. We’ll see what happens from here.”
So it seems that, whilst Fury has been doing the Hokey Cokey with his intentions to fight, the contract has been edited and sent back by Matchroom, reviewed again by Queensbury and is now back in Matchroom’s hands. It sounds like progress, despite the initial deadline having come and gone.
More news soon, undoubtedly.