By Charles Brun: This Saturday’s Tyson Fury vs. Francis Ngannou ESPN+ PPV undercard is absolutely horrible from top to bottom and seems like it’s slanted towards the British audience.
Promoter Eddie Hearn is calling this event a “money grab” and is giving the 37-year-old Ngannou “no chance” of beating WBC heavyweight champion Fury, and he’s right.
For the steep price tag of $79.99 for PPV on ESPN+, you’d expect much more from the undercard than the assembled mismatches.
For this card to sell for American fans, it would need to be in the $5 range or less, as there are no fights on the entire card, including the dreadful trainwreck main event, that is worth watching.
When do you ever see a novice fighter with a 0-0 record taking on a world champion in boxing in their first fight?
Ideally, the promoters should have scrapped the entire undercard and used the money saved to put together one good fight between Arslanbek Makhmudov and Jared Anderson to give fans something appealing to watch.
That fight would have been world’s better than the awful main event between the flabby 35-year-old Tyson Fury and the glacially slow Francis Ngannou.
We haven’t seen Fury against a top-caliber heavyweight for two years in his infamous ‘long count’ fight with Deontay Wilder in 2021, and it appears that he’s been resting on his laurels ever since.
Fury-Ngannou undercard for Saturday
Fabio Wardley vs. David Adeleye
Joseph Parker vs. Simon Kean
Arslanbek Makhmudov vs. Junior Anthony Wright
Moses Itauma vs. Istvan Bernath
Carlos Takam vs. Martin Bakole
Jack McGann vs. Alcibiade Duran Galvan
Charles Brun doesn’t see any fights on this undercard that are worth watching because they’re all pretty much showcase matches designed to make the A-side guy look better than he actually is. Again, the Wardley-Adeleye bout is competitive on paper, but so what?
These guys lack the talent to win a world title unless it’s a secondary strap, like the WBA belt. With the right matchmaking, Wardley or Adeleye can be maneuvered into capturing that belt, but boxing fans ignore the fighters that hold that title because it’s a trinket job.
On social media, UK fans on bleating about how great the Fury-Ngannou undercard is, calling it “excellent,” but for U.S fans, there’s nothing there, as only one of the fighters, Arslanbek Makhmudov, is destined to win a world title, and he’s probably going to be locked out of being given a chance to fight for a belt until he’s old & gray.
Instead of Makhmudov being matched against a good heavyweight to give boxing fans something to watch on this eyesore card, he’s facing 37-year-old Junior Anthony Wright (20-4-1, 17 KOs), a fighter who isn’t ranked in the top 15. Why is this fight happening?
As far as I can tell, there’s only one competitive fight on the undercard between British domestic-level heavyweights Fabio Wardley vs. David Adeleye, but neither of those guys will ever win a world title. Moreover, they’re not well known to American fans.
Wardley is just some guy who has been spoonfed soft opposition his entire six-year professional career, and the same with his opponent Adeleye.
Ngannou blows his stack over Eddie Hearn’s comment
“He got dropped, but he didn’t get knocked out,” said Francis Ngannou to iFL TV about Tyson Fury getting knocked cold by Deontay Wilder in their first fight in 2018, the one where the referee kneeled over an unconscious Gypsy King and giving him a count in what many fans felt was a very, very, very strange picture.
“Who gives a s**t what Eddie Hearn says? Who is Eddie Hearn?” said Ngannou when told that Hearn says he can’t punch inside of a boxing ring. “This fight is happening, and he can do nothing about it.
“Absolutely, yes. Right now, he’s [Fury] arguably the best heavyweight in the world unless somebody else proves otherwise.
“They have a point to write me off. This is my first boxing match, but people always write me off. I’m always the underdog,” said Ngannou about no one giving him a chance of defeating Fury.
