Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn chats with Fight Hub TV about the future plans of Anthony Joshua. Hearn says that while Joshua loves the idea of potentially fighting Deontay Wilder, he would prefer for Joshua to get a tune-up kind of fight before going into that kind of match, although he has no problem with it conceptually. Check out some of what Hearn had to say below.
Eddie Hearn on if he really believes a Deontay Wilder fight is a natural one to put Anthony Joshua in
“I mean, I just said we reached out in Wilder’s team back in August to do a fight this year with probably Dillian Whyte, or potentially Anthony Joshua. They replied yesterday and said they would like to — yeah but (Wilder) did end up fighting Helenius — saying ‘we’d like to hear more.’ So I invited them here this weekend, they can’t come, but we’ll explore that. I see that as fight two for Anthony Joshua, probably, but it depends when he fights.
“AJ, if he fights earlier in the year, he’ll probably have his bigger fight in the summer, and that fight will be Dillian Whyte, Deontay Wilder, who knows what happens with Tyson Fury. But AJ is not really interested in just having tickover fights — sometimes those fights are really dangerous in the heavyweight division.
“(Joshua) loves the Wilder fight, I’ve said it could be the biggest fight in boxing. And I know the Fury fight’s big but AJ against Wilder is a huge fight. We will continue those conversations with Shelly Finkel and hopefully we can work with Deontay Wilder.”
On how a fight between Joshua and Wilder could be made considering their network affiliations
“DAZN are very willing to work with broadcasters to make sure the best fights get made. Again, I don’t know enough about the Tank-Ryan Garcia issue, it sounds like Showtime don’t want DAZN involved, and if they did the fight would get made instantly. And then when you look at Spence-Crawford, after Crawford’s comments last night, it was ‘we offered them more money than we could’ve made but ultimately we couldn’t do it because it wasn’t a PBC fight and they wouldn’t allow that.’
“So I think that’s all you can do, really. And ultimately, our offer to Deontay Wilder would be just that: here’s an amount of money for the fight. If we have to work with cross networks we have no problem looking at that — Anthony Joshua’s exclusive to DAZN. We can look at a dual broadcast, we can look at just making you an offer and maybe contractually you can just accept that offer, I don’t know.
“But these fighters also have to look after themselves in terms of taking opportunities and if fights can’t get made in one way, they should look at another way...”
Hearn on his contract status with Oleksandr Usyk
“That was our last fight — actually his contract lapsed with us before the AJ fight but obviously because we had the rematch clause we had that fight. I don’t rule out working with him again. I think I’ve done his last six fights or something like that and we’ve done a great job for him. He’s a great fighter, great person, and I guess now he’ll just wait for the Fury-Chisora fight...”
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