Fury Vs. Usyk Can Happen Next, Hrgovic May Spoil That, Shalom Fires Shots At Hearn

Alex Krassyuk has increased hopes that a fight between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury can happen next provided that both fighters come through their next fights. 

Usyk is set to face Daniel Dubois, his WBA mandatory, on August 26th, 2023. Meanwhile, Fury takes on Francis Ngannou on October 28th, 2023, as the latter makes his boxing debut.

And as both fighters are expected to win, Krassyuk has turned his attention to finally making the undisputed fight.

After all, there are no other fights that the boxing fan base is realistically keen on seeing for now. That is why Krassyuk threw down the gauntlet by putting the ball in Fury’s court. 

Fury Vs. Usyk

“It can happen next if Tyson Fury doesn’t s**t his pants and gives his consent to fight Usyk for the undisputed. That’s the only obstacle that we have. If he starts to invent when he has this theater fight, he starts to invent, ‘I need a vacation. I need a rest. I need to do some business with my family. I need to go through another tune-up fight’ or whatever; it just confirms what we knew about this fight.

“We never negotiated 30% [for the Fury fight]. It was his last-minute hope to walk out as the rooster of the situation, but he failed to because Usyk called his bluff. And then he had to find another way out of the situation, trying to convince everyone that he is the champ, but everyone knows the truth. We don’t need to say anything more. If you want to fight, you fight. If you don’t want to fight, you try to find a way out not to fight. That’s what we see now,” Krassyuk

Hrgovic Spolis Fury Vs. Usyk

Despite this being the case, it is important to bear in mind the following point. Usyk does have mandatory challengers that he has to get through. And after the Dubois win, his IBF mandatory will be called. That is currently Filip Hrgovic.

Therefore, if a Fury-Usyk fight were to happen next, the Croatian would have to be on board. This would require him to aceept some step-aside money in order to make it happen.

This was considered when talks over a Fury-Usyk fight emerged amid the latter’s rematch with AJ. Joshua, however, did not take the step-aside money, as he faced Usyk in the rematch.

And when it comes to Hrgovic, he let everyone know that he would not be accepting any deal. His following comments confirmed as much.

“I should be next, yeah, I’m next in line, IBF is next in line. According to all the rules, I should be next. There’s no unification fight, they had all the time in the world to make that unification and they didn’t want to do that. So you vacate the titles or you fight your mandatory, that should be the case.

“They don’t want to do that fight, Fury’s fighting some guy who’s never boxed before, they don’t want to do that. So fight your mandatories, I’m not gonna step aside and I want to get my shot. I deserve it, I work hard, I’ve been in this sport for 17 years and I want to get my chance,” Hrgovic

Shalom Slams Hearn

Meanwhile, Ben Shalom, the head of Boxxer, has thrown shade at Eddie Hearn’s promotional tactics. 

Shalom is currently competing against Matchroom and Frank Warren’s Queensbury Promotions in an attempt to establish himself as a leading player in British boxing. 

And at age of 27, Shalom is far from a seasoned promoter. He has already been at loggerheads with Hearn following the negotiations between his fighter Richard Riakporhe and Hearn’s Jai Opetaia, the IBF cruiserweight champion.

Riakporhe pulled out of a purse bid, as Hearn responded by stating that Shalom was ‘afraid’ to lose the bid. Although Shalom did not respond directly by mentioning Hearn, it appears those comments did touch a nerve. 

“Look, we work with all promoters but there seems to be one promoter that wants to stop every fight we did. We had it with Eubank-Smith and it went on and on and on. We had it with this fight (Buatsi-Azeez), and it nearly stopped that. And we had three fights we wanted to make, one was Riakporh-Opetai, one was Buatsi-Azeez, one was Eubank-Smith. We managed to get two of them through,” Shalom said

The sport of boxing has been accused of not putting on the biggest fights. And the current problems mentioned already go on to prove that, which is why something has to change.