Sam Goodman suffers cut over left eye, fight with Naoya Inoue is off

Sam Goodman won’t be fighting undisputed junior featherweight champion Naoya Inoue — not in 2024, at least.

“He picked up a cut on his eye in his last spar before flying to Tokyo,” wrote Bradford, who also posted two photos. A close-up of the wound was provided by Australian boxing broadcaster Ben Damon.

Inoue vs. Goodman was scheduled to take place on December 24 in Tokyo. Inoue holds all four major world titles at 122. Goodman (19-0, 8 KOs) is the IBF’s mandatory contender and is also ranked first by the WBO.

This would have been the third fight of the year for Inoue (28-0, 25 KOs). He dispatched contender Luis Nery via sixth-round technical knockout in May. A seventh-round TKO over TJ Doheny in September was thought to be a stay-busy bout, keeping Inoue active before he took on another ranked challenger in Goodman.

Now it is uncertain whether Inoue-Goodman will be rescheduled and what this might mean for Inoue’s 2025 plans, which could include facing Alan David Picasso in April in the United States, a big clash with bantamweight titleholder Junto Nakatani later in the year in Japan, and perhaps — somewhere in-between the two — a defense against WBA mandatory challenger Murodjon Akhmadaliev (should Akhmadaliev win his fight this Saturday).