Hearn warns Joshua vs Fury fight could be cancelled

Boxing promoter Eddie Hearn has warned that the long-anticipated fight between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury could be called off. He said this could happen if the organisers announce the fight in New York without first agreeing to hold it in the United Kingdom, PUNCH Sports Extra reports.

There has been no official announcement about the fight yet. Earlier reports claimed both fighters had signed contracts to face each other.

Fury returned to the ring for the second time this year. He fought Mariusz Wach, 46, in a low-key match in Thailand. Fury won that fight by corner retirement in the seventh round, just before Joshua made his own comeback.

In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Joshua faced a lesser-known opponent, Kristian Prenga. Prenga knocked Joshua down twice in the first round. But Joshua came back to stop Prenga in the second round. This result seems to set up the potential Fury-Joshua fight, which is being discussed for Madison Square Garden in November.

On The Punch Podcast, Hearn said he and Joshua want the fight to happen in the UK, as stated in 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 particular, really want to do the fight in the US,” he said.

Hearn disagreed with the reasons being given by the American broadcaster. He pointed out that he would not be the one making the final decision because of the money involved.

“It’s like, ‘we are partners, we are paying a lot of money, you have to understand that we need to put the fight where we feel is, commercially, the best place’. I don’t agree with their arguments, but I am not paying the money,” he said.

Hearn also revealed that organisers wanted to announce New York as the venue. He warned that this could cause the fight to fall apart completely.

“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 ahead and announce it, and you will probably see me coming out quite quickly to say, ‘no fight’,” Hearn said.

He insisted that if they announce the fight without agreeing on a venue change, it would mean no fight at all.

“I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight, and we are not bluffing. We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK,” he said.

Hearn explained their plan is to make it financially unappealing for organisers to hold the fight in America. They want the fight to stay in England.

“We kind of want to say, ‘well, if you want to 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,” he said.

For now, it looks like they are further away from agreeing on a venue than earlier reports suggested. British fight fans are hoping that Joshua and Hearn can persuade Netflix that the UK is still the best place for the fight.