Joshua, Whyte bout back on track

Promoter Eddie Hearn has responded to Dillian Whyte’s claims that he has been ignored whilst attempting to make a fight with Anthony Joshua – and progress seems to have been made.

The heavyweight fighting out of Brixton spoke to various media outlets on Friday to hit back at Hearn, who recently said he wasn’t satisfied with the money offered for the ‘AJ’ rematch and therefore negotiations were over.

Whyte said that he wanted to make the fight happen and that he had been chasing Hearn unsuccessfully to do so. The promoter spoke to Boxing Social, giving his side of the story.

“They say no contact’s been made but they’re happy to accept the offer, so they’ve obviously received the offer. That’s the fight that I was asked to make. We made an offer to Dillian Whyte four, five weeks ago and they came back and the exact wording was ‘absolutely not, this is unacceptably low and basically nowhere near a number we’d accept.'”

“I funnelled that back to AJ and the team and they said okay we’ll move on. Now they’ve just come out today out the blue and said ‘we accept that offer’ right when we’re about to announce, or in final negotiations with, another opponent.”

Despite the confusion and the public nature of the he-said-she-said, Hearn confirmed that he was still looking to get the fight made.

He reached out to Whyte’s team on Friday following the latest developments. When they confirmed they would accept the numbers as they were, he set about getting a contract ready.

“We went straight back to Dillian and said ‘can you confirm you accept that offer’ and they said ‘yes we do.’ I said fantastic, so we’re getting them a contract. They’ll have a contract today. We need to move at pace, but if they’re serious that fight can 100% happen. It’s still the fight AJ wants for August 12th. If Dillian’s serious that fight’s gonna happen.”

The promoter expects things to move quickly from here, both from necessity and the fact that it’s a ‘simple’ deal.

“This contract’s not gonna be difficult. It’s a set purse, there’s no travel, there’s no extreme media obligations … It’s pretty simple. So we don’t want them to come back with a million things on the contract … it’s seven weeks on Saturday.”

Joshua and Whyte are currently in training and could be facing off for the second time in their professional careers in London on August 12.