Welsh star Joe Cordina still hopes his path might cross with Shakur Stevenson in the future.
The two were set to fight at the end of 2024, until Stevenson suffered an injury in training.
But, instead of Stevenson-Cordina being revisited, Stevenson returns on February 22 in a fight against Golden Boy’s promising Floyd Schofield. Asked whether he still views Stevenson as a possible future foe, Cordina responded: “Of course. There’s probably going to be, in this situation, a sense of me going on a collision course with him. So, just getting wins after wins after wins until he’s got no choice but to fight me. Or, if we can get to some sort of agreement, then come to a fight.
“But at this moment, it don’t seem like he wants to fight me. Not saying he’s scared whatsoever, but it looks that way. Because when he was at super feather he called me out, I said, ‘Sure, no problem. Let’s go’. Then you decided to make a fight with someone else. Okay, he might have been your mandatory. I don’t think he was, but I had a mandatory anyway. And a unification overrides a mandatory, so it didn’t really matter. But he took another fight and then ended up failing the weight. So then he moved up. So, that’s not a problem. That fight’s off the cards.
“Then, when I’m at lightweight, I’ve been offered Shakur again. No problem. We take it. I’ve done my deal. We know he’s done his deal because Eddie [Hearn, who promotes both] has done his deal, because he’s with Matchroom. So it was a simple fight to make and get over the line. I agreed to my purse with him in a matter of a day or two with [advisor] Spencer Brown. And then we’ve gone through this.”
It was on October 12 when Cordina and Stevenson were scheduled to box, but their fight for Stevenson’s WBC lightweight title was cancelled when Stevenson had to undergo hand surgery. Stevenson, 27, was expected to return in February against Golden Boy’s William Zepeda, but Zepeda could not make the date following his hard fight with Tevin Farmer in November, and Schofield then came in.
“So when the fight fell through, through injury, the most common thing to do and the easiest thing to do is just to reschedule the dates,” Cordina, 33, explained. “And then, all of a sudden, he won’t be ready for the new year. Okay, no problem.”
Cordina then tried to get active having lost for the first time in his career, to Anthony Cacace in May, but couldn’t get a date. A two-time world champion at 130lbs, Cordina is 17-1 (9 KOs).
“Then, I see that he [Stevenson]’s fighting Schofield in Feb,” he continued. “So I was thinking, ‘What is going on here?’ And then, and these are Eddie’s words, he says, ‘I don’t think he wants to fight you’. They were Eddie’s words. And that was it.”
Cordina said he could have been ready for February 22 had the call come, and that he trained during the fallout of their fight in case it was rescheduled. Then he returned home to Wales from Harlow – where he works under Barry Smith – and trained at home.
“But then I seen he’s fighting Schofield, and then I went back home and ticked over back home,” he said. And that’s what I’ve been doing up until this week. I came back up and just decided to get back in the mix.”
Read the full article here
