Big Question: Will Fury-Joshua actually be next for the heavyweight champs?

It’s been talked to death, but is the undisputed heavyweight championship fight actually coming next?

Last week’s Big Question asked how long you thought Avni Yildirim would last against Canelo Alvarez. Seemed kind of insulting on paper, I suppose, but then it was kind of an insulting fight to ask people to pay to see.

Guess what? It turned out pretty weak, too! The damned “haters” and “critics” were just right this time, sadly enough — hey, man, I’d have also preferred Yildirim gone out and fought his heart out even if over-matched. Would have been more fun. Would have been a better story.

Anyway, the voters were basically right. The slightly majority (43%) said Canelo would finish him inside of four rounds, and he did it in three. The rounds 5-8 pick was just behind (42%). Five percent said Yildirim would get stopped between the ninth and 12th rounds, three percent said he’d go the distance, and six percent had themselves a good little laugh and predicted he’d win.

This week we’ll switch our focus back over to the heavyweights, and specifically the much-discussed Tyson Fury vs Anthony Joshua fight. It seems like Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn has been saying “we hope to announce it in two weeks” for a few months now, because basically that’s the case. Top Rank’s Bob Arum and Queensberry’s Frank Warren, along with Hearn, have all expressed their confidence the deal will get done. That’s rare.

But the fight hasn’t been announced yet. The target was June, perhaps, and we’re into March now. You’d want a heavy promotional cycle for this fight, obviously. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be announced any day now (actually part of the reason I’m posting this is I hope the fight gets announced and the whole thing is old hat quickly), but there are other notes of concern.

For one thing, Arum is now pissed at Hearn for bidding on the Teofimo Lopez-George Kambosos Jr fight — neither of them won; Triller did, and for what it’s worth, Hearn doesn’t seem to care about Arum being mad. In fact, he used it to kinda poke the bear even more. Hearn has always, and probably rightly, had the sense that Arum may rant and rave and call you every name in the book, but if a deal is there to be done that makes everyone money, it can get done.

More concerning, perhaps, is Fury himself saying that the sides are “no further forward today than we were a year ago.” The “Gypsy King” just doesn’t sound all that confident, but then Tyson Fury says a lot of things if you ask him questions.

You guys have seen a lot of boxing news cycles come and go just like I have. Are you still confident Fury-Joshua is coming next for both of them?