An impassioned Steve Bunce spoke to Boxing Social on Tyson Fury’s next moves, including the potential fight with Anthony Joshua and another rumoured opponent in Mahmoud (formerly Manuel) Charr.
‘Buncey’, who has covered the sport of boxing at top outlets for decades, first gave his thoughts on the very public nature of negotiations for ‘The Gypsy King’ to face ‘AJ’.
“Is there a cut off point for listening to the endless ramblings of everybody involved with this fight? I’m not a big fan of utter secrecy but I also don’t want to go through everything so constantly. It’s really, really getting boring.”
“Is it going to happen? My gut feeling is that this week, they’ve probably come closer this week through conversations that people have had than they’ve ever been. But coming closer doesn’t mean it [the fight] is close. Have there been forward discussions now? Yes there have, but we had the fight made last year remember. So the answer is, I don’t know.”
Should the all-British super fight not materialise, another man in the mix is Charr – former WBA Regular Champion. Whilst Bunce would be as keen as anyone to see Joshua across the ring from Fury, he was clear that the alternative wasn’t the worst option.
“Charr isn’t the worst guy to fight for a world title, okay? He’s not the worst.”
“Manny Charr is a perfectly okay heavyweight challenger in the grand scheme of things. He wouldn’t even make my top 50 bad challengers.”
On the general state of boxing media, the journalist and pundit was strong on the opinion that he, nor anyone else in boxing media, would say that Charr was an unworthy opponent.
“That’s the exact amount that will say the Manny Charr fight shouldn’t happen. Zero. No one will. You know why? Because you get paid for access, you get paid for your hits.”
“Is it the fight I want to see [Fury – Charr]? Of course it’s not. But you know what? I’ll fall in line when I hear all of you guys [YouTube boxing media] saying this fight shouldn’t happen. When I started in this business, when I was banned by this guy, kicked out of this show, banned by that guy – because that’s what I used to say. I was an idiot, being banned. An idiot being banned.”
It’s an intense speech on the nature of boxing reporting, and certainly worth a watch in full below.