UFC Hall of Famer and former world champion Michael Bisping has slammed John Fury and the corner work of the wider Fury team as ‘absolute madness’.
Fan favorite UFC fighter turned commentator Michael Bisping certainly knows a thing or two about competing in combat sports at the highest levels, but even ‘The Count’ was critical of Tyson Fury’s corner as they mismanaged the final rounds against Oleksandr Usyk.
Tyson Fury partially blames his corner for not pressuring in final rounds
At the post-fight press conference, Tyson Fury repeated his stance that both he and his team thought that they had done enough over the 12 hard-fought rounds to earn a decision victory over Usyk.
In fact, Fury claimed that the entire team believed he was winning the fight going into the final rounds, and that their lack of advice was partially to blame for why he didn’t get a late TKO stoppage:
“If they would’ve said to me in the last round ‘You’re down, go out and try and finish him’, I would have done that. Everyone in the corner believed we were up. I thought I was bossing the fight.”
Michael Bisping slams Tyson Fury’s corner for ‘absolute madness’
Speaking via his official YouTube channel, former UFC middleweight champion and Hall of Famer Michael Bisping slammed both the corner of Tyson Fury for the ‘shambles’ in between rounds and Fury himself for the post-fight comments.
“People online are saying that the corner work was absolute shambles because John Fury was screaming over the top of SugarHill… John Fury was screaming over the top, so you’re sitting there getting conflicting advice [when] you need a cool, calm, collected corner.”
Bisping explained how the corner work in such an enormous boxing fight “where the stakes are so high is absolutely vital,” before noting that a lot of the advice isn’t about improving the fundamentals, it’s about getting a fighter into the right mindset.
“A lot of the time you don’t need to tell them how to box, you need to calm their minds and give them an accurate reflection of what’s going on the fight… You can’t have people shouting all over the place, that’s absolute madness.”
“You can’t have people getting emotional and trying to be heard and be seen on camera,” said ‘The Count’, before taking a swing at the patriarch of the Fury family himself for getting in the way of SugarHill, one of the best trainers in all of boxing:
“Of course, John Fury is his father and he’s emotionally invested but sometimes you have got to know your place.”
In the clip below, you can hear Tyson’s corner telling him that he is easily winning the bout heading into the final rounds:
Harking back to his own iconic career as a UFC champion, Bisping shared how his team had a system where only one coach would speak to him in between rounds at a time, and that there was a clear hierarchy between them:
“When I was fighting in Mixed Martial Arts, I had Jason Parillo as my lead guy, [and] I had Brady Fink as my grappling coach… Jason, he would give general thoughts on the fight and talk about some striking, then speak to Brady if it was necessary.”
Bisping also took issue with Fury’s comments at the post-fight press conference, specifically The Gypsy King’s statement about how he would have fought harder, had his corner been honest with him about how the fight with Usyk was playing out:
“The reality is, and I’m not trying to rip on Tyson Fury, he was trying to stop the fight the whole time; nobody plans on going to the judges. Those uppercuts that he was throwing, they were deadly.”
“I would have liked to have seen Tyson Fury follow up with a left hook, another right hand to go again and to follow the momentum,” said Bisping, before reiterating that it was Fury himself who let the fight slip away from him in Riyadh:
“There were certainly a couple of times when Usyk was a little bit rocked, and he never capitalized on those moments. So, Fury blaming the corner to a certain degree there.”
There is a rematch clause in both fighters’ contracts, with that second bout between Usyk and Fury expected to take place around October of this year.