George Warren has revealed that the highly anticipated fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua fell through because there was ‘no ambition’ from the latter’s team.
George, son of Queensberry Promotion's Frank Warren, had been negotiating with Joshua’s team on behalf of Fury to get the deal over the line.
The proposed fight between the two British heavyweight superstars looked all set for December 3rd a few weeks ago, but now the bout is effectively dead and buried.
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Fury took to social media twice to let people know that the fight wasn’t happening due to Joshua failing to sign the contract before the deadline he had set, before extending it by a few more days, only for the same result.
Joshua had also taken to social media to let supporters know that he was going to sign the contract but at this point the fight has been taken completely off the table.
Earlier this week, Matchroom Boxing’s managing director Eddie Hearn said that talks fizzled out with Fury's team due to a lack of communication.
He said: “Tyson Fury says we’re telling you now the fight is off unless you sign on Wednesday. I said it’s impossible. That deadline passed, I’ve not heard back from George Warren since Wednesday.
“So, as far as we’re concerned, the fight’s off.”
Now Warren has waded in to share his side of the story.
He told talkSPORT: “I would say there was no ambition on their side to help me try and keep the thing going, that’s what it felt like by the end of it.
“I heard Eddie say the last time we spoke was on Thursday. The truth of the matter is we were waiting for a turnaround on a contract to come back on Wednesday evening.
“We didn’t get that, we instead got an email from Frank Smith, who obviously works for Matchroom, to ask us if we were still up for having discussions.
“Quite quickly after that, Eddie and I spoke in the night. It was left so that he was going to email me something over to the extent of dealing with what they declared as their final issue related to the way that we drafted the contracts, which was related to our position of having final say.
“It fell down because quite frankly we got to a point with them where communication coming back from them and the substance of that communication was lacking.
“I tried to call Eddie a couple of times on Thursday, he didn’t answer my calls, didn’t get back to me. I briefly spoke to Freddie Cunningham [of 258 MGT] on Thursday. It was left that he was gonna come back to me and let me know their position on how quickly they wanted to move on this thing.
“I chased them up with a phone call, didn’t get a return, didn’t hear back from them on the text that I sent them. And the last bit of communication was myself and Frank Smith - we spoke on Friday relating to a different fight that we’re looking to try and finalise with Matchroom.”
