Tyson Fury: Canelo Alvarez has never faced anyone like Billy Joe Saunders

Tyson Fury and Billy Joe Saunders are well-known as good friends, the pair have trained together, by all accounts get along well, and have always backed one another for fights.

Fury is again on Saunders’ bandwagon as Billy Joe gets set for by far the biggest fight of his career on May 8, when he faces Canelo Alvarez at AT&T Stadium in Texas.

Saunders (30-0, 14 KO) has never lost a pro fight, but he’s come fairly close a few times, and he’s also been known to let his conditioning badly slip between fights, meaning he has to spend far more time on getting on shape than would be ideal.

But by all accounts, Billy Joe is fully on point for this one, as he’ll need to be.

“Billy Joe Saunders is 100 percent mentally in the right place, he knows what he has to do and he will do it, he will rise up and claim greatness,” Fury wrote on Instagram.

“I was wrote off many times in the past and have always come through. We are cut from the same cloth, same breed of animals. Canelo has fought them all but never a Fighting Gypsy, we are a different breed of animal to anything he has come across before.”

Now it has to be said that Fury is very loyal to the people he likes, and while a very smart man about boxing, he isn’t always right, either. He championed Nathan Gorman against Daniel Dubois, that turned out about like one of my great staff picks upset calls.

But few question that a fully dialed-in Saunders certainly could be a handful for Canelo or anyone else. He’s a tricky, crafty, smart southpaw with skills, and we’ve seen him pull through in those fights where he almost slipped up, too, he’s never had what I’d call a robbery win or anything, though he’s had to escape by the skin of his teeth a couple times.