By Charles Brun: Kubrat Pulev is reporting that his June 20 fight against IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua will be POSTPONED for three months until later this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Although Pulev (28-1, 14 KOs) says he’ll be ready to fight AJ on the 20th of June, he doesn’t see that fight happening.
Joshua and Pulev are scheduled to fight on June 20 at the Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium in London, England. If the fight goes get postponed, they may need to find a different venue.
Joshua-Pulev may need a different venue
There’s no telling whether the Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium will be available in the last quarter of 2020. The stadium will be used for Premier League football, and that could make it difficult for Joshua and Pulev to fight there.
Of course, it won’t be a big deal for Joshua’s promoters to find a different venue, but he wants to fight in the UK. If Joshua didn’t have that requirement, it would be easy to find him a different venue somewhere else like Saudi Arabia.
Pulev could prove correct on the fight with Joshua being postponed. There still isn’t any let up with the virus worldwide and in the UK, and the only way the fight will get the green light to go ahead is if the numbers of cases start dropping.
One way of salvaging the Joshua-Pulev fight for the original date would be to stage it behind closed doors, but Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn is stubbornly resisting that idea.
Hearn still believes that the Joshua-Pulev fight will go ahead on June 20th, but he might be saying that simply to make sure that the fans don’t stampede to the ticket office to get refunds.
Pulev: It’s impossible to fight on June 20
“It is s impossible for the fight to take place on 20 June, although I am ready,” Pulev said via the Independent. “The match will take place a few months later, perhaps towards the end of the year.”
This will be the second time that the 38-year-old Pulev has challenged for a world title. In 2014, he fought IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, but he was stopped in the 5th round in Hamburg, Germany. The 6’4 1/2″ Pulev was no match for the powerful 6’6″ Klitschko, who was at the end of his prime.
Joshua (23-1, 21 KOs) is coming into the fight on a high having beaten Andy Ruiz Jr. by a 12 round decision win back his lost titles in Saudi Arabia last December. Ruiz had stopped Joshua in the 7th round last June in New York and exposed both his poor chin and stamina in that fight.
This is the second time that AJ and Kubrat were scheduled to fight each other. They were supposed to fight in 2017 in Wales, but Pulev suffered a shoulder injury that caused the fight to be canceled. Carlos Takam then came in and fought Joshua as the replacement opponent, and was stopped in the 10th round.
