Is Tyson Fury Going to Pull Out of his Fight with AJ?

It all started in an interview with former world heavyweight champion, Frank Bruno. He said someone was telling him that Fury had been injured in training and might pull out of the mega-fight on December 11th.

The first problem with this story can be found in the words "someone was telling me". In other words, he was not there to witness the injury himself and has no direct evidence that it ever happened. Strangely, the interviewers - Charlie Parsons and Tony Bellew - didn't press him on what kind of injury it was, and who had told him about it. 

Is Bruno trustworthy? Well he doesn't seem the kind of man to make things up. It's hard to imagine that there would be anything for him to gain by doing so. But what we don't know is the trustworthiness of the man he was talking to.

It is believable that someone in the Fury camp could have confided in him. Frank is from  Wandsworth in south London. When he was growing up, that area was home to traveller communities, and he used to spend time with them. Understanding their culture helped him form a bond with the Furys.

The story could of course be genuine. It's certainly not unusual for boxers to suffer injuries during training. Older athletes like Fury and AJ are more prone to injuries, and they also take longer to recover from them.

If they don't cancel their upcoming fight, boxers usually keep quiet about them until afterwards. The loser in particular, will sometimes bring up injuries as an excuse. Could Fury be getting an excuse out there in case he loses?

But boxing is full of tricks and mind games, and Tyson Fury has always been a master of them. It could also be possible that someone in the Fury camp "fed" the injury story to Bruno, knowing that he would repeat it. Because he is seen as a neutral "uncle" figure, the story would seem credible.

While looking for another source on the story, I saw the former cruiserweight champion and Sky Sports pundit, Johnny Nelson was saying the same thing. Apparently he too had heard Fury was injured and was likely to pull out of the fight.

What was his source for the story? It was actually Frank Bruno. So despite the headline, this was not a second source at all. It was Nelson repeating what he'd heard from Frank Bruno, who had heard it from someone else anyway.

If the Fury camp had wanted to spread the rumour, they must be quite satisfied with how things are going.

Hopefully, Team Joshua are  disciplined enough to completely ignore this story, and train for the best possible version of Tyson Fury on December 11th.