Right Then, The Latest Shape Of It
Right then. After months of Wembley talk, curfew talk, Riyadh talk and Dana White talk, the Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury fight appears to have landed somewhere nobody was expecting.
Spencer Oliver, speaking to talkSPORT Boxing, says he expects an announcement this week, and that the date has moved off November 28.
“I think we’re going to get December the 4th or December the 11th, which is a Friday night, with that landing at Cardiff, at the Principality Stadium.”
A Friday. In December. In Cardiff.
The Stadium Choice Is Actually The Sensible Part
Credit where it is due — the Principality is the right building. It has a roof, and in December in Britain a roof is not a luxury, it is the difference between a great occasion and seventy thousand people watching two heavyweights slip about in the sleet.
It has history for this too. British heavyweight boxing has had some proper nights in that stadium, and it holds enough people to make the noise that this fight deserves. If you were choosing a UK venue for a December stadium fight, there is no second option worth arguing about.
And it honours what Eddie Hearn told everybody last week, which is that the contract already names the country and the country is this one. That fight was worth having and the UK side won it.
Everything After That Is Aimed At Somebody Else
Here is the reasoning for Friday, and it is not complicated. Saturday is busy in America. Move to Friday and you have the sporting evening to yourself across the Atlantic, which is what a streaming platform paying streaming money wants.
Work it through for the people actually in the building. Main event between two and three in the morning. Stadium empties at half three, four o’clock. Cardiff on a Friday night at four in the morning with seventy thousand people trying to get to a hotel, a car park or a station that is not running.
Now add that a Friday fight means taking the day off work to travel, and paying December hotel prices in a city that will have quadrupled them the moment the date is confirmed.
We have done this 2am conversation before with Wembley and it was daft then. At least Wembley has a tube line.
The Argument For It, Fairly Put
I will give the promotion its due. The alternative to a 2am ringwalk in Cardiff was not an 11pm ringwalk in Cardiff. The alternative was Riyadh, or Las Vegas, and a fight the British public watches at four in the morning from their own sofa having paid for the privilege.
Seen that way, an awkward night in Wales is a win. The fight is here, the money is here, the atmosphere will be British, and the pictures that go around the world will be of a packed Welsh stadium rather than a half-empty arena in the desert.
That is a genuine argument and I understand people making it. I just do not think “it could have been worse” is much of a slogan for the biggest British fight in a decade.
And Let Us Be Honest About The Fight Itself
This should have happened in 2018. It should have happened in 2021. Both men were better then than they are now and everyone reading this knows it.
What we are getting is two enormous names in the back half of their careers, one of whom has been stopped by Daniel Dubois and one of whom has lost twice to Oleksandr Usyk. It is still the biggest domestic event of the decade. It is not the fight it was.
Luke’s Verdict
Make no mistake, it will sell out inside an hour whichever Friday they pick, and the atmosphere in that stadium at 2am will be one of the great nights of British sport. The public will turn up because the public always turns up.
That does not make it right. The people who create the thing the cameras are there to film are being treated as the least important part of the promotion, and somebody should say so before the tickets go on sale rather than after.
My call: December 11 at the Principality, announced within the week, Friday confirmed.
My prediction for the fight: Joshua by stoppage inside eight. Fury’s legs have been going for two years and Joshua is the bigger puncher of the two at this stage of their lives. If Fury cannot move, Joshua will find him.
More heavyweight coverage on our news page, and every confirmed date is on the fight schedule.