A good night for Tyson Fury, a great night for Anthony Joshua

I’m handing the lead of this boxing column over to Linda Richman, the Mike Myers Saturday Night Live character who hosted the “Coffee Talk” sketches. Take it away, Linda …

Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: Turki Alalshikh’s surprise announcement teased during Saturday’s Netflix broadcast of the Tyson Fury-Arslanbek Makhmudov fight was neither a surprise nor an announcement. Discuss.

In Alalshikh’s mind and according to his script, the fight card at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was going to end with Fury calling out Anthony Joshua and Joshua agreeing on the spot to that British heavyweight mega-fight, to the shock and delight of fight fans worldwide.

There were just two little problems.

First, the fact that Fury-Makhmudov was designed as a tune-up for Fury-Joshua was the worst-kept secret in boxing. Of course these two ex-champions are on a potential collision course. They’ve been on a potential collision course for the last several months (and off and on for years). Alalshikh promised a big surprise, but for us to be surprised, Fury would have had to say he intended to next face … well, literally any human not named Anthony Joshua.

Instead, when Fury took the microphone, he did the one thing that could not possibly be described as a surprise.

Then came the bigger problem: There was nothing to announce, surprise or otherwise. Fury and Joshua have no agreement in place. Alalshikh and Eddie Hearn have no agreement in place.

A call-out is not an announcement. A call-out is, at best, a possible prelude to an announcement.

But there was nothing to announce on Saturday in response to Fury’s call-out. AJ made damned sure of that.

Joshua couldn’t be bothered to so much as stand up from his ringside folding chair. In pro wrestling parlance, he “no-sold” Fury.

There would be no nose-to-nose photo op in the ring, no fake fracas with cornermen and security guards holding the heavyweights back. Just Joshua, sitting on a chair, barely expressive, flipping Fury the bird, declaring himself the landlord.

If you ask me, he played it perfectly. While sitting still with a mic in his hand, he put up more threatening resistance to Fury than Makhmudov did standing and stalking with gloves on his hands for 36 minutes.

It was Fury who earned his 35th career victory in London over the weekend, shaking off 16 months of rust and enjoying the feeling of having his hand raised for the first time in two-and-a-half years. 

But it was Joshua, who had 29 victories on his record at the start of the evening and still had 29 at the end of it, who was the biggest winner of the day.

This couldn’t have gone more perfectly for AJ – both because of things he couldn’t control (what Fury did in the ring) and things he could (his refusal to let Fury dictate terms).

If we make the assumption that Joshua does indeed want to fight Fury and would like that fight to be as massive as possible, as meaningful as possible and as winnable as possible, Fury’s 12 rounds with Makhmudov delivered precisely what AJ needed.

For starters: Fury won. If he hadn’t, the conversation afterward would have been “should Fury fight again?” rather than “who will Fury fight next?”

So, with that most basic of boxes checked, the focus shifts to how Fury performed and what that performance told us about how much he has left at age 37.

The short answer there is that he looked, more or less, like the boxer we’ve long known him to be. Fury is most definitely not a shot fighter. He still moves with fluidity, can keep up a half-decent pace and can take a pop on the chin without crumbling.

It must be noted, however, that Makhmudov got this gig for a reason. He’s as ponderous and predictable a heavyweight as could be found in the BoxRec top 50. This fight was never going to prove anything about Fury’s upside; it could only disprove fears about his downside.

And it did that. The bellowing behemoth revealed himself to still be competent in the boxing ring.

And that’s all that was needed to keep Fury vs. Joshua meaningful.

This isn’t Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao II, a fight that, whether it counts on their records or not, counts toward their legacies about as much as Tom Brady playing flag football counts toward his.

Fury vs. Joshua, even if it would have meant more five years ago, even if the window for it to be for the legit heavyweight championship has closed, is still a fight between two viable contenders.

And that’s crucial for Joshua in particular. Because as it stands right now, if these two never face each other, Fury, who won the lineal championship in 2015 and didn’t lose it in the ring until 2024, will go down as the top British heavyweight of the era.

He beat Wladimir Klitschko before Joshua did. He topped Deontay Wilder in the greatest heavyweight trilogy since Riddick Bowe vs. Evander Holyfield. And he never got knocked out by any massive underdogs.

That’s not to say there isn’t room for some degree of debate. Joshua fought slightly better competition overall. He fared better against Francis Ngannou than Fury did. And he didn’t spend chunks of his prime in semi-retirement.

But still, ask 100 boxing historians, and at least 90 of them are going to rank Fury higher on the all-time list.

If these two never square off against each other.

And that’s a big part of the reason AJ should very much want this showdown to happen. Fury revealed himself against Makhmudov to be credible enough that defeating him still means something. And that, in turn, means that with a single victory, Joshua can flip those rankings.

Pacquiao defeating Mayweather in 2026 doesn’t make Pacquiao greater than Mayweather overall. Joshua beating Fury in 2026 does change the historical pecking order.

And here’s the capper for Joshua: Despite all his own flaws, he can absolutely beat Fury.

Joshua has long had confidence issues, but they seem mostly to stem from a lack of trust in his chin and his stamina.

That doesn’t mean things always go well for him when he steps forward with confidence. It worked out nicely for AJ against Ngannou, but not so much in the first fight with Andy Ruiz nor against Daniel Dubois.

Fury, though, is not a puncher. His knockout rate is respectable, but most of those KOs have come in the later rounds, more often through accumulation and attrition than pure power. At no point did he badly hurt Makhmudov, who’d been stopped in both of his previous losses.

And Fury will not force Joshua and his heavy muscles to fight at an exhausting pace. In his last three fights, all of which went the full 12 rounds, Fury threw 496, 509 and 498 punches. So he’s always right around 41 or 42 per round. It’s a steady work rate, but it’s far from overwhelming.

Fury is always in better condition than those two jiggly protrusions on his lower back would have you believe, but he’s also in the back half of his 30s and will be looking to buy time with a little clinching and mauling every bit as much as Joshua will.

Lennox Lewis often said he preferred those rare occasions when he got to punch up against a taller opponent rather than having to punch down. I suspect the same is true of Joshua, whose four defeats have come against three men shorter than he is.

Joshua has always been more of an overhand-right guy than an uppercut guy.

It’s all guesswork until the opening bell rings, but I suspect the styles-make-fights of it all will be slightly to AJ’s benefit.

And he is absolutely right to make Fury work for a deal. If Joshua had said, “Yeah, let’s do it, I’m ready” into that microphone on Saturday without the terms for the fight all worked out, he would have given away most of his leverage.

Obviously, it wouldn’t be wise for him to negotiate and marinate this thing past the point of no return. Joshua needs to ultimately sign on the dotted line.

But if and when he does, when they’re putting together video packages hyping Fury vs. Joshua, those clips of Joshua sitting on a chair, staring blankly at Fury, will actually serve the promotion quite well.

Those verbal exchanges after Fury-Makhmudov were, frankly, more memorable than any fistic exchanges during Fury-Makhmudov.

Joshua no-sold Fury. And I think that helps sell Fury-Joshua.

There will be no surprise announcement anytime soon. Either there will be an announcement of a fight or there will be the surprise that there is no fight, but there can’t be both.

Until we know which it is, just talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: Sometimes the best way to stake your claim to the throne is just to stay seated on your chair. Discuss.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.