Tyson Fury has refuted claims that his camp was part of the reason why he struggled to beat MMA champion Francis Ngannou in a disaster showing on Saturday night.
The world heavyweight boxing champion was priced as wide as 1/20 to beat Ngannou, who had never boxed before their massive crossover fight over the weekend. But by the end of the third round, he had been on the canvas and the script had been completely flipped.
Fury ended up scraping through by just one point to earn a split decision win, and will now face Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed heavyweight title as planned. However, their meeting has been delayed from the ambitious December 23 date that had been touted in Saudi Arabia after he suffered considerably more damage than planned.
The boxer's close friend and former two-weight world champion Billy Joe Saunders believes that there was a problem in camp, writing on Instagram : “Too many yes men in camp, not switched on from the word go. But he [will] be switched on for the Ukrainian [Usyk].”
However, Fury has refuted claims like Saunders', addressing the more general idea that he may have not trained properly for Ngannou. In an interview with IFL TV, he said: "It wasn't the best performance but I am not going to make any excuses; I had a good camp, there was no one to blame. It was a tough fight, I had to get off the floor to win and there's no excuses.
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"It was a below par performance but take nothing away from the other man, you're only as good as your opponent will let you be, that's a fact... If I'd have listened to the media and the so-called boxing experts saying 'oh it's an easy fight, it's a mismatch, not worth watching' then I wouldn't have been able to win that fight.
"I didn't underestimate him, I trained for 12 weeks, gave it the best preparation I could have done and that's it. We didn't know how good he was or how bad he was, there was no footage of him and we'd never seen him fight before as a boxer so that was it, he was a lot more awkward than I thought he'd be.
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"He wasn't walking on to things, he was an awkward man and he was good at what he was doing, so fair play to him. Let's not take anything away from him, he gave me a better fight than all the boxers in the last ten years. I think that's been my toughest fight I've had for years.
"Not so much my toughest, he maybe won the 10-8 round and one other round but other than that I was just boxing and he couldn't really close the distance down so at points it was tough, not so much the other way.
"There's no 'who's to blame?' Blame me. It's not blame the trainer, blame the manager, blame the cutman, blame me if you're going to blame anybody.
"It was what it was, it's the fight game, it's not tap dancing, you go in there, have a fight get out of there and get paid. The good thing is I've got paid, I'm going home to my family and we go on to the undisputed fight - happy days!"
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