No announcement has yet been made for the long-awaited grudge match between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua despite previous news that both men had signed on the dotted line.
Having fought in April, Fury returned to fight for a second time this year as he squared off with a 46-year-old Mariusz Wach in a low-profile scrap in Thailand, winning via seventh-round corner retirement the night before Joshua’s comeback.
In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, previously unknown contender Kristian Prenga twice floored Joshua in the opening round, only to be stopped himself in round two to seemingly tee-up Fury-Joshua – mooted to take place at Madison Square Garden in November.
Yet, speaking to The Punch Podcast, Eddie Hearn maintained that he and ‘AJ’ are still pushing for the event to be staged in the United Kingdom, as per their contract.
“Everybody wants to do the fight in New York apart from Anthony Joshua and me. We are under a huge amount of pressure and we are being told by Turki Al-Alshikh and those guys that Netflix, in particularly, really want to do the fight in the US.
“It’s like, ‘we are partners, we are paying a lot of money, you have to understand that we need to put the fight in where we feel is, commercially, the best place’. I don’t agree with their arguments, but I am not paying the money.
“But, we wouldn’t have signed the contract, if the fight was in America. So, we have to have a discussion around that.”
The promoter then went on to reveal that those involved in the event want to publicly announce New York as the location; a move which could ultimately cause the fight to collapse, he warned.
“The other day they wrote to us and said, ‘just to let you know, we would like to announce the fight for New York’ and I said, ‘no, you can’t’. There might even be a situation where they go for it and do announce it and you will probably see me coming out quite quickly and say, ‘no fight’.
“I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight and we ain’t bluffing. We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK.”
“We kind of want to say, ‘well, if you want do it in America, you have got to pay us all of this money to change,’ because we are not really bothered about the money – we want it in England. So, we want to make it so much money that they just say, ‘you know what, let’s just do it in England’, that is our dream scenario.”
For now, it seems as though an agreement is further away than first thought, with British fight fans left hoping that Joshua and Hearn can convince Netflix that the United Kingdom would be a better location for all parties.
