By Scott Gilfoid: Former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury says he’s ready to fight IBF belt holder Anthony Joshua in a big money clash without a tune-up fight first to get ready for the match. Fury, training at the MTK Boxing Gym in Marbella, is that confident that he’ll deal the bodybuilder look alike Joshua (19-0, 19 KOs) his first defeat when/if they face each other this year.
Well, For Fury to get his fight against Joshua, it will require that Wladimir Klitschko steps aside to let that fight happen. Wladimir has a rematch clause in his contract with Joshua, and he DOES plan on executing that rematch clause. Whether Joshua and his promoter Eddie Hearn can persuade Wladimir not to is the million-dollar question. I don’t see why Wladimir wouldn’t force the rematch. I would.
No way on earth would I let Joshua escape without me getting a second shot. If Wladimir lets Fury fight Joshua first, he’ll likely lose to Fury and then the interest in a Joshua-Klitschko II fight would evaporate on the spot. Instead of Wladimir fighting Joshua in front of 90,000 boxing fans again at Wembley Stadium, he might wind up fighting in front of a half filled stadium.
Can you all imagine the build up of Tyson2fastfury vs AJ boxing original bad man vs the Squeakyclean nice guy.😜😜😜😜😜😜😂😂😂😂😂
— TYSON2FASTFURY (@Tyson_Fury) May 1, 2017
Oh my, Fury is pushing hard for the Joshua fight, isn’t he? What is Wladimir to do? Should have back off and let Fury and Joshua fight or should he be assertive and insist on getting his rematch with big Joshua? What’s the point of having a rematch clause if you’re going to not execute it? But I think there’s going to continue to be a lot of pressure building in the next month or two for the Joshua-Fury fight.
Wladimir will have to ignore all that if he wants to go ahead and go for the Joshua rematch. I don’t see why Wladimir wouldn’t take the rematch. He was better than Joshua and he could have won the fight if he had made the decision to finish him in rounds 6 or 7.
Before Fury can beat the stuffing out of Joshua, he needs to get his boxing license back. The British Boxing Board of Control will be meeting next week to decide whether to give the unbeaten Fury (25-0, 18 KOs) his license back or not. It should be interesting to see what happens with that.
Fury feels that he won’t need a tune-up because he’s not old like the 41-year-old Klitschko, who you can argue should have taken 1 to 2 tune-ups to build up his stamina and ready for his fight against Joshua last weekend.
Wladimir ran out of gas in the later rounds against Joshua and was stopped in the 11th. This could have been avoided if Wladimir hadn’t rushed into the fight with the 27-year-old Joshua. The way that Wladimir steamed into the fight, it gave some boxing fans the impression that he was just gambling and looking for that one last payday before retiring. Surprisingly, Wladimir was beating Joshua and had him within an eyelash of being knocked out. Few boxing fans expected Wladimir to look so much better than Joshua. Personally, I’m not surprised, because I’ve known along that Joshua has almost no experience at the pro or the amateur level, and he was facing a guy that had better boxing skills than him in Wladimir.
You can’t get Wladimir’s type of skills in just 18 fights. Heck, you can’t get those skills in even 60 fights. You’ve got to have a long amateur background, great coaches and the overall talent to develop into a talent like Wladimir. Joshua didn’t have any of that. He’s just a big guy with power. He’s this generation’s version of George Foreman, but without the skills, powerful jab or the crushing inside power that Foreman had in his prime.
“It is the only one the world wants to see and I am here, I am the lineal champion, I am still number one in the world and everybody knows that,” said Fury to skysports.com about a fight between him and Joshua. “I don’t even need a warm-up if he wants this. I have been out of the ring as long as Klitschko but the difference is, I am not 41, I am 28.”
As fat as Fury is now, he should be smart about it and take 2 or 3 tune-ups before he fights Joshua. As far as I can tell, Fury has never been this heavy before with him reportedly weighing 365 pounds. Losing 115 pounds is a much different story from the weight that Fury has had to lose tin the past to get down to fighting weight. Moreover, Fury hasn’t fought in close to 2 years. That’s a long time to be out of the ring for anyone, even someone who is in the prime of his career.
Fury owes it to himself to approach the Joshua fight in the right way by taking the weight off, testing himself with some tune-ups, and then building up the fight with a big promotional campaign. For Fury to come out of his 2-year layoff and go straight into a Joshua fight, I think it’s stupid. It gives Joshua a big handicap because he gets to fight Fury with him being rusty and having lost a TON of weight. We just saw how awful Joshua looked against a rusty Wladimir.
Can you imagine what a non-rusty version of Wladimir would have done to Joshua? I think he would have knocked him out and made quick work of him. Joshua looked no better than Hasim Rahman did when he fought Wladimir years ago. There was no difference. It was a mismatch for all intents and purposes, but Wladimir failed to put Joshua away in round 6. Wladimir said he thought it was going to be “his night” and he didn’t feel that it was necessary to go for the knockout in the 6th or 7th rounds.
I guess he thought Joshua would continue to look clueless, slow and not particularly skilled for the entire fight. I think more than anything, the huge pro-Joshua crowd motivated Joshua into winning the fight in the 11th when they started screaming a lot after he landed a big shot at the start of the round. Before that, Wladimir had dominated rounds 6 through 10 with his jab, movement and rock solid defense. School was in session.
Wladimir was taking Joshua to school in his classroom and literally embarrassing him in front of 90,000 of his own boxing fans. It was sad to see how flawed and pedestrian Joshua was. He looked like a big lumbering bodybuilder with a poor skillset, swinging wildly and missing with slow punches. This was not a young George Foreman. Joshua fought more like the 40-year-old version of Foreman after he made a comeback after being out of the ring for 10 years.
Welll done, Anthony Joshua, good fight. You had life & death with Klitschko & I played with the guy, let’s dance 💃,” said Fury on his Twitter after Joshua’s win over Wladimir last Saturday.
There was a huge difference between how Fury beat Wladimir and how Joshua did. Joshua couldn’t dominate Wladimir because he was too muscular, slow, and too slow on his feet and didn’t have enough talent. Joshua was underequipped to do the job. In the end, Joshua was able to pull out the victory, but only because Wladimir got tired and let him hang around long enough to get his second wind.
“Styles do make fights but I am sure I can beat AJ with one arm tied behind my back,” said Fury in talking about what he would be able to do against Joshua.
We may see the Joshua-Fury fight next if all the pieces in the puzzle fall into place. A lot of things will need to happen for this fight to go down next. It just as easily could fail to happen if everything isn’t perfect.