World champion scores Fury versus Ngannou, while Matchroom plans to host boxing match in Africa since Muhammad Ali
Among the know-hows re-scoring the match between boxing debutant Francis Ngannou an WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is Paulie Malignaggi, a two-weight world champion.
According to Malignaggi, ‘At the end of the day, Ngannou wasn’t going to be a guy that was going to be able to stay consistent over the course of ten rounds.
‘By the end of the fight, Fury won the fight, it was a split-decision, was it more competitive than we thought? Yeah, absolutely. Does Ngannou deserve a lot of credit and does Tyson Fury deserve the criticism? Absolutely.
‘This was a class performance by Francis Ngannou regardless, but I don’t think that he won enough rounds and at the end of the day I had it about 96-93.
‘I don’t think he won more than three rounds, maybe four rounds if you are a little bit generous, but he won the bigger rounds and Fury won all the quiet rounds, but you still have to score the quiet rounds.’
Eddie Atlas gave his own score recently, saying a different thing from Carl Froch.
However, as Francis Ngannou awaits a rematch with Tyson Fury in the late months of next year since Fury’s bout with Oleksandr Usyk comes up before March, Matchroom Sports’ Eddie Hearn is cooking up a great event for his client Anthony Joshua, which he called ‘the Rumble in the Jungle 2’.
The first Rumble in the Jungle was Muhammad Ali’s contest with George Foreman in Zaire, which saw Ali emerge as the winner. The opponent Hearn wants for Joshua in this dream event of his was Cameroon’s Francis Ngannou, who showed his worth with the scary performance he displayed against Tyson Fury. Anthony Joshua has familial ties with Nigeria.
Eddie Hearn said the event is still just a dream: ‘It is difficult to say that he (Ngannou) is not a world-class fighter, because I feel like he just beat Tyson Fury.
‘We had a meeting, me and Francis, about five or six months ago and he asked me to make the Anthony Joshua fight. I went back to ‘AJ’ and said ‘look, I have met with Francis Ngannou, what a lovely gentleman.
‘What do you think?’ and he went ‘no, I am not interested. I do not like the gimmick stuff, I just want to win the world heavyweight championship’.
‘Now I am looking at it, Francis Ngannou versus Anthony Joshua, perhaps in Africa as the Rumble In The Jungle 2, it is one of the biggest fights in the history of the sport. I promise you this, respect to Francis, but it is easy work for my man.’
On the other hand, Oleksandr Usyk’s team does not want to fight Tyson Fury yet because of his less-than-expected performance lately, but they have set up a training camp for Usyk, according to promoter Alex Krassyuk.
‘We have set up the training camp for him in Spain. He is focused on December 23 and he wants to push for December 23.’
‘[Waiting until next year] is not something that we agreed for, but if he [Fury] is really injured, what can we do? This is number one, and number two – we would not like to beat Saturday night’s version of Fury.
‘It brings no benefit and no credit if you beat up a man like that. We want Fury to be in his best shape ever. Because we are thinking not just about the belt, we try to create history. It has to be spectacular.’
Their fight scheduled for December 23 was cancelled by Tyson Fury’s promoter, Warren, after the wounds on Fury’s body following his bout with Ngannou showed them Fury was unfit to compete that early.