.jpg?fit=1024%2C1024&ssl=1)
Most fighters in Mahmoud Charr’s position would be rooting for negotiations to fail between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua.
However, even the former WBA secondary champion is rooting for things to head in the right direction in his own way.
An all-British heavyweight world championship remains up for discussion, despite Fury’s assertion that his own deadline has passed without a deal and that he is ready to move on to the next one. That plan would be a matchup with Charr (33-4, 19KOs), who followed Fury’s lead by using social media to openly mock Joshua.
“Anthony Gato-ua. You have the opportunity to fight the best heavyweight in the WBC, Tyson Fury. He signs the paper,” Charr stated Monday on his Instagram channel. “If not, he goes out there and lets the real men fight. Tyson Fury, come on. Let’s go.”
Fury (32-0-1, 23KOs) has hinted all along that Charr (33-4, 19KOs) was always the backup plan if Joshua (24-3, 22KOs) didn’t meet the terms within the contract deadline. Monday. The promoters of Manchester’s Fury and Watford’s Joshua (Queensberry Promotions and Matchroom Boxing, respectively) continue to work hard to salvage the long-awaited battle of the behemoth British heavyweights.
If an agreement is reached, Fury would make the second defense of his WBC heavyweight and lineal championship in a fight to take place on December 3 at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The fight, which would generate a 60/40 split in favor of Fury, would give Joshua a chance to become a three-time heavyweight champion, even as he is coming off back-to-back losses to Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk (20-0). , 13KOs) in their pair of WBA/IBF/IBO/WBO heavyweight title fights.
Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s career-long promoter, previously told the UK media that he found Fury’s Monday deadline unrealistic as they had just received the contract offer and still had a lot to discuss. Among the topics to be discussed are the various platforms working together to present the fight. Fury is signed to BT Sport in the UK and ESPN+ in the US, while Joshua recently signed a long-term deal as a global ambassador for DAZN.
Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing and Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions remain hopeful of a deal, a welcome sign of optimism from the longtime promotional rivals.
Yet Fury wastes no time insisting that Joshua is out and that he has moved on to Charr, a 37-year-old Lebanese-born heavyweight of Syrian descent who is based in Cologne, Germany, who has won his last five. begin. The streak included a long but bizarre WBA ‘world’ (regular) heavyweight title reign that lasted over three years but did not feature a single title defense.
Charr claimed the secondary belt in a November 2017 points victory over Alexander Ustinov. He was supposed to defend himself against Fres Oquendo, only to test positive for a banned substance that canceled the fight, but which he was able to successfully protest alleging that the chain of custody was broken due to the handling of the analyzed samples.
The plan then changed to defending against then-interim champion Trevor Bryan, which failed on several occasions and ended with Charr being stripped of his title for failing to obtain a travel visa to properly defend his belt. The matter serves as the subject of an ongoing lawsuit filed by Charr against the WBA and Don King, Bryan’s Hall of Fame promoter, whom Charr and his team allege colluded with the sanctioning body to freeze him.
Meanwhile, two wins have followed since that ordeal: a second-round knockout of then-undefeated cult favorite Chris Lovejoy last May in Cologne, and a third-round knockout of Nikola Milacic last May 28 in Hamburg. . There are no firm plans for an upcoming fight other than being fail-safe in case Fury-Joshua doesn’t take place.
“I still think the fight will take place between Fury and AJ,” Erol Ceylan, Charr’s promoter, told BoxingScene.com. “But we will be ready if someone calls us.”
Fury insists that the day has already come.
“I look forward to fighting a man who wants to fight and has fire and desire,” Fury said Monday on social media, referring to Charr. “I fought some of the best fighters and now I’m stepping up again! Get in there Charr.
The last remaining piece of the puzzle would be for Charr to magically break into the top 15 of the WBC heavyweight rankings. He is currently ranked number nineteen, though these matters have a wonderful way of being resolved once such a fight develops. Charr’s team can lobby for a more favorable ranking and title eligibility at any time, including the next WBC convention in early November.
Jake Donovan is a senior writer for BoxingScene.com. Twitter: @JakeNDaBox
