Yesterday, coincidentally on the same day that Canelo Alvarez and Edgar Berlanga went face-to-face for the first time in advance of their September fight, Turki Alalshikh announced on social media that Canelo against Terence Crawford is no longer a fight that he is interested in making; with the Saudi money man writing how he “doesn’t want it anymore.”
Crawford is likely to instead stay at 154 pounds, where he of course recently won a belt, while Canelo, if he gets past Berlanga, will move on and fight, well, we don’t know who (although we all know who we want Canelo to fight, and that’s David Benavidez).
Alalshikh wrote how he will now be concentrating on making big fights, not only for “Bud,” but also for Jaron Ennis, Devin Haney, Shakur Stevenson and others. Additionally, Alalshikh wrote how he will be looking to stack the under card of the December 21 rematch between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury.
“Just wrapped up an important meeting now with my team, planning for the upcoming fights that we will make for 2024-2025. I decided to discard the Canelo fight, as I don’t want it anymore,” Alalshikh wrote.
“Instead, I will be focusing for the US market with bigger fights, especially for the legend Crawford. Additionally, I will support making fights for Boots, Haney, Shakur, Ortiz, Anderson, Benavidez, Zepeda, and more. Regarding Tim Tszyu, there’s something unclear with the communications from his team with our team, so I believe I will reconsider the situation. For the rest of the world, definitely, I am focusing on Riyadh Season card, Wembley edition, 21st of September (AJ Vs. Dubois) and depending on the results and the results of Riyadh Season’s opening card (Bivol Vs. Beterbiev) on the 12th of October, I will build the card for the rematch of Fury Vs. Usyk on the 21st of December and another big card on the first quarter of 2025. Stay tuned.”
It will be very interesting seeing what fights, what match ups, Alalshikh will put on for the AJ-Dubois card and the Usyk-Fury II card. Hopefully, there will be additional heavyweight fights on both cards. Martin Bakole’s name springs to mind as far as who could fight on either card, and maybe Joseph Parker, Zhilei Zhang (if he doesn’t get a big fight in his homeland of China), Jarrell Miller, and maybe Agit Kabayel and one or two other heavyweights.
Both heavyweight headliners would pull in the fans as stand alone fights, but with some stacked under card action the P-P-V numbers could prove massive. There promises to be some more big, big fight cards this year. We may have lost Crawford Vs. Canelo, but plenty of fans felt that one was unrealistic all the way, with 168 being just too big of a jump for “Bud.”
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