Deontay Wilder, Anthony Joshua
Shelley Finkel, the manager of former WBC world champion, Deontay Wilder, has hinted that the American boxer might be facing Anthony Joshua in Saudi Arabia soon.
Finkel said Wilder is looking for his next opponent after his victory against Robert Helenius in one round last October.
Although both fighters were in talks to face each other in 2019 with Wilder’s team reportedly offering £40m ($50m) to stage the bout in Las Vegas, Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn called off the negotiations after failing to see evidence of the prize.
At the time the heavyweights both held world title belts – Joshua had the IBF, WBO and WBA belts while Wilder was the WBC world champion.
But now both men are looking to rebuild their careers after damaging losses, so with the pressure off the possibility of a match-up has re-emerged.
Joshua and Wilder were linked to a highly-lucrative and high-profile card in Saudi Arabia last week, with Hearn claiming the £323m could even see the British star and his American rival face each other on the same night as Tyson Fury vs Oleksandr Usyk.
Finkel told Sky Sports that Wilder has now talked up the chances of a fight happening in Saudi with Joshua.
Editor’s Note
In our post on February 19, 2023, in a story ‘Woman burns self to death over failure to offset N70,000 loan’, we reported that a middle-aged woman, simply known as Mama Dada, set herself ablaze over her inability to pay back a loan of N70,000 she reportedly took from a microfinance bank, LAPO. We have since discovered that the microfinance bank referred to in the story was not LAPO Microfinance Bank Limited. We apologise to the LAPO Group for the error in the identification of the name of the said microfinance bank where the deceased took the loan. The mix-up in the name of the MFB is not deliberate.
