4/15 in The Great Wen (exact venue within London tbd). Joyce will make a first defense of his WBO interim heavyweight title versus a fellow late-thirty-something once-upon-a-time-Olympic-silver-medalist. Joyce, in addition to being interim champ and Usyk's mandatory under the auspices of the WBO, is ranked #2 by TBRB and #4 by Ring Magazine, but is absent from the other three major ABC organizations' top fifteens. Zhāng is currently not ranked by any single body's top 15, having gone 2-1-1 in the last two years and coming into this opportunity directly off a loss.
Zhang is rated #15 by the WBC and #12 by the WBO. Also, he just fell out of being rated by The Ring due to Fury's return.
Oh and eat: my ass ✅ your heart out ✅ ...@Vegan Beast; you can't go calling out @Scott Cork for his title not being sufficiently "informative" (despite the fact that anybody in his target demographic, which is fans of heavyweight boxing whom you'd expect to know all the division's top contenders well enough to know their nicknames, could have sussed out exactly who it was about with minimal difficulty) and then yourself half-ass it and not provide meticulous detail yourself. Behold, their proper full names and nicknames (Zhāng's in China, long predating this "Big Bang" hokum he got saddled with by Western promoters and media, has always been 铁拳王子) and the poll set with an end date that actually reflects when the fight is happening, not a fortnight before. Besides, everyone likes me better and knows my poll threads are the official ones on ESB.
What rankings are you looking at? (date of publication) These ones are supposed to be accurate up to a week ago, 1/13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_boxing_rankings#Heavyweight_(201_lbs+_-_91.18_kg+)
Boxing Scene, updated as of 1/17 for the WBO and 1/10 for the WBC: https://www.*******.com/rankings Also, just to add, Box Live: https://box.live/boxing-rankings/
Just checked, according to the WBO, Zhilei is ranked #12 https://wboboxing.com/wp-content/themes/wbo21/pdf.php Don't trust Wikipedia, kids
He's looking at the ratings on Scene. The WBC ratings were as of Jan. 10. The WBO ratings were as of Jan. 17. And, frankly, who cares where they are rated? Ring, TBRB, and three of the four sanctioning bodies don't even have the right guy listed as Heavyweight Champion. It's a great matchup between two dangerous and exciting heavyweight bangers. It's a tossup fight. The winner puts himself firmly in line for a shot at the real title. Did you start this thread just to ridicule the matchup? There's already another thread for this fight. You should know. You posted in it before you started this one.
Cheers. My go-to source for rankings collation was always fightnews (at that /rankings1 url) but that feature apparently died off several months back and they never replaced the link with a working and continuously supported one (just a badly neglected "test" version) so I've been at kind of a loss where to find reliable data without going individually to each org...
Great match up. From a what's next for Joe Joyce thread I told ya'll. Big Joe is about that life. We built different. I expect him to stop Zhang sometime during the second half of the fight. Joyce is almost as heavy as he is and the pressure and pace he sets should take its toll on him maybe between 6-10. Joyce possesses the power and volume to hurt him but likewise Zhang is one of the few HWs out there who possesses the power to hurt him too.
I think that Joyce is like Zhang, only more so. We're gonna look at two 1800s sail powered battleships throw slugs at each other from boarding range until the HMS Zhang eventually crumbles and sinks.