Anthony Joshua has decided the trash talk portion of Fury vs. Joshua starts now. According to Geo Super, Joshua said he’s closer to title-winning form than Tyson Fury, which is a polite British way of telling the other guy he’s the one who should be worried.
That’s the whole quote trail we’ve got, so I won’t dress it up. Joshua made the claim, Geo Super ran it, and the timing tells you plenty. This fight finally has real numbers attached to it. On Saturday, Championship Rounds passed along a Sky Sports Boxing report on X in which Dana White put the expected gate for Fury vs. Joshua at $34 million. If that holds, it slots in as the fourth biggest gate the sport has ever seen, behind Mayweather vs. Pacquiao ($72.2 million), Mayweather vs. McGregor ($55.4 million) and Canelo vs. Crawford ($47.2 million).
White’s name being anywhere near a heavyweight boxing gate is its own subplot. MMA Fighting’s Between the Links crew spent a chunk of Thursday’s show on White’s growing frustration with Eddie Hearn over the drama surrounding this fight, and noted that both men’s stances seemed to shift during the week. Two promoters who are used to being the loudest voice in the room are now sharing one, and neither seems thrilled about it.
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Meanwhile, Joshua appears to be putting in homework with a legend. Gaston Reyno posted a clip on X of Roberto Duran, the original Manos de Piedra, teaching Joshua body shots. You can say a lot about a heavyweight, but if he’s flying in a Hall of Famer to show him how to dig to the ribs, he’s at least taking the assignment seriously.
Fury, for his part, carries baggage that the MMA crowd knows well. He’s the guy who took Francis Ngannou’s money fight, and Yahoo Sports noted this week that Ngannou walked out of the UFC through a contract dispute and landed a near eight-figure payday against Fury. And when MMA Fighting wrote about Israel Adesanya swearing he’ll never unretire, it listed Fury right alongside Chuck Liddell, B.J. Penn and Conor McGregor as stars who never fully committed to calling it a career. That’s the opening Joshua is aiming at. If you keep walking away and coming back, the other guy gets to ask how sharp you really are.
No date or venue for the fight appears in the reporting so far, so treat any you see floating around as speculation until someone official says it out loud.
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My take: I love this. Joshua has spent years as the polite, corporate half of this rivalry, the guy who gave you a clean answer and a nice smile. Hearing him call his shot against the most famous heavyweight mouth of his generation is the version of AJ I’ve wanted for a while, because great fights need somebody to say something they’ll have to back up. Fury will answer, he always does, and he’ll probably be funnier about it. But Joshua threw the first punch with Duran in his corner, a $34 million gate on the table and two promoters squabbling in the background, and now the claim sits on his record until fight night proves him right or makes him eat it.
