By Edward Chaykovsky
According to Matchroom Sports founder Barry Hearn, Olympic gold medal winner Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15KOs) will win a world championship by the end of this year. Joshua us coming off the biggest win of his career, when he knocked out his domestic rival Dillian Whyte with a drilling knockout in the seventh round.
Joshua is ranked highly, with a number 2 ranking under the WBC and a number 5 ranking with the IBF. The WBC world title will be defended by Deontay Wilder next Saturday in Brooklyn against Artur Szpilka, and the vacant IBF title will be at stake on the undercard of the same event, as Vyacheslav Glazkov (21-0-1, KOs) and Charles Martin (22-0-1, 20KOs) battle it out.
"Joshua will be world heavyweight champion by the end of 2016," Hearn said told Sky Sports News. "It's just a question of getting him a fight because there isn't a heavyweight out there that can survive Anthony Joshua. Not in the slightest chance."
"This boy is going to be something very special for a very long time. He will hold a version of the world championship. That's not to say that Joshua hasn't got a huge amount of improvement left in him, because he has."
Hearn does caution that his company, run by son Eddie Hearn, will not rush Joshua to a title shot. They are going to take their time and place him in there when they believe the boxer is 100% ready to go.
"Of course we'd all like [Joshua] to be unified heavyweight champion of the world," Hearn said. "But there is no rush. When you've got the best, and we've got the best, there is no rush. If you rush and make mistakes you might devalue your product so everything has to be analysed," Hearn said.
"Tyson Fury is a huge fight but there's no rush. The danger is that Fury gets beaten by somebody - that could happen unfortunately because I'm not a big fan of his technique. But if Fury does stay unbeaten then, next summer, that's the biggest fight in British boxing history."
