April 5 – Deontay Wilder called out Anthony Joshua for a long-awaited matchup between the former heavyweight champions, after Wilder edged Derek Chisora to clinch a split-decision victory in London on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Wilder came face to face with Joshua as he walked past the Briton after the fight. The two fist-bumped, and the American said, “Let’s do it.”<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t a few words, I dapped it up with him and I said, now let’s get it on,” Wilder told reporters when asked about the exchange.<\/p>\n
“I’m ready for whoever, long as these guys are in the heavyweight division, I am here. You can call me Mr Clean, because I want to clean up the whole division. The division is nothing without Deontay Wilder.”<\/p>\n
American Wilder was the WBC champion when Joshua held the WBA, IBF and WBO belts, but a unified heavyweight championship bout between them never materialised, as Wilder went on to lose to Tyson Fury and Joshua lost his belts to Oleksandr Usyk.<\/p>\n
Undefeated Usyk went on to become the unified champion when he beat Fury in May 2024.<\/p>\n
Joshua was last in action in December, when he knocked out Jake Paul.<\/p>\n
A few days later, he was hospitalised following a car accident in Nigeria that killed two of his close friends.<\/p>\n
Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn, who was with him during the exchange with Wilder, said the fight would not be a problem for the Briton.<\/p>\n
“He said, let’s do it. AJ sort of stared at him ice cold, but he would fight him no problem,” Hearn told Fight Hub TV. REUTERS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 5 – Deontay Wilder called out Anthony Joshua for a long-awaited matchup between the former heavyweight champions,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586991,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-586990","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-boxing","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}