Fury camp plan legal fight
Hughie Fury’s team are planning to take legal action over the scoring of his World Boxing Organisation bout against New Zealander Joseph Parker in Manchester.
Parker, defending his WBO title, was declared the victor on points on Sunday (NZT). Two of the three judges scored the bout 118-100 to Parker, with the third making it a 114-all draw.
Fury’s promoter Mick Hennessy has been indignant about the result and now claims their legal team will ‘‘protest and overturn’’ the result by appealing to the WBO over the scores, The Telegraph in London reported.
Hennessy has accused ‘‘dark forces’’ of conspiring against Fury and his cousin, Tyson Fury.
‘‘I’m going to get that overturned. I’m going to find out who’s behind boxing decisions like this,’’ Hennessy told The Telegraph.
‘‘I know corruption is a strong word, but I tell you now, there are forces at work around this game. We will put in an appeal and protest as strongly as we can. A rematch has to be a worst-case scenario – we want this overturned. I thought it was a masterclass by Fury. I thought he wiped the floor with him. He was gliding round the ring hitting him with jabs at will – it was shades of [Muhammad} Ali the way he was moving.’’
Hennessy said there was ‘‘100 per cent, definitely’’ an agenda against the Fury family, but Peter Fury, Hughie’s father and trainer, wasn’t so sure a legal challenge would change the outcome, even though he too has lambasted the decision.
‘‘I had Hughie at least four rounds ahead because Parker was swinging and missing. Hughie has had a very bad decision,’’ he told The Telegraph.
However, Parker’s trainer Kevin Barry felt the claims Fury was robbed by the judges had no substance although he admitted the deciding scores from two of the three judges of 118-110 were ‘‘a little wide’’.
‘‘There was only one guy fighting and one guy surviving and you can’t win the heavyweight world title if you go backwards for 12 rounds and land a handful of punches, simple as that,’’ Barry said.
Parker thought he had won the bout, but was worried about the scoring immediately after the bout.
‘‘I knew that I did enough to win and I knew that I won convincingly. But we are in Manchester, you know,’’ the 25-year-old said of coming through his second defence of the coveted belt and his first on foreign soil.
‘‘Some of the scorecards in other fights didn’t live up to what happened in the fight, so I thought it might have got taken away from me.
‘‘We won by a wide margin on two judges. I don’t know what else we could have done other than knock him out.’’