J’Accuse! Franny Says Promoters Used Dirty Tricks To Help ‘AJ’ Win

Ngannou believes Matchroom Boxing and Queensbury Promotions intentionally messed with his fight day schedule to throw him off his game.

At 0-2, Francis Ngannou is still learning how the boxing world works. And he’s getting a pretty good education in all the sneaky ways the sport can beat you down and spit you out. He suffered an extremely questionable split decision loss to Tyson Fury, which taught him something important about boxing judges. And from his second round KO loss to Anthony Joshua, he learned that boxing promoters will happily trip you up if given half the opportunity.

Following the fight, “The Predator” said he felt off before stepping into the ring and couldn’t get himself going. The main event’s late start certainly had something to do with that, and now Ngannou is suggesting on the Joe Rogan Experience that it was all part of a plot by British boxing promoters to leave him waiting for five hours in his locker room.

“We get into fight week, and every time we’re going to do media, they’re going to pick me up and then I get there and have to wait an hour and a half before [media] arrives,” Ngannou told Rogan. “On the third day of fight week, [striking coach] Dewey Cooper started to get very mad, ‘This is what they do to get fighters tired!’ But at the time I didn’t know what was going on. So I’m like ‘No, come on, relax. It’s okay. I didn’t know until we get to fight day.”

“Fight day, we receive an email. Pickup time: 10:30 from the hotel. And when they say 10:30, by 10:20 there’s a car at your door waiting. The supposed fight time is between midnight to 1. We get to the arena at 10:45. A producer comes into the locker room, says, ‘Oh, guy, we are running late on the broadcast. Now we’re gonna go around 1:45.’ I’m like okay, 1:45. It’s 10:45. 3 hours. Okay.

“It was around 1:30 that [Joshua] arrived. I’m like … so we supposed to fight at 1:45?” Ngannou exclaimed. “He’s arriving at 1:30 … we leave the room at 3:30. I have been in Saudi Arabia almost two months training to fight between midnight and 1. But even at that time I didn’t know what was happening. It was only after everything. Because I got to the point that I was so tired, I was in the locker room hitting mitts, then sitting down, falling asleep. Then I tell [coach] Eric NIcksick there’s something wrong. I’m asleep. I feel like I wanna sleep. Like, I’m sweating. But we just keep going.”

Ngannou was careful not to implicate “AJ” in his accusations.

“Not to say Anthony Joshua couldn’t beat me,” he said. “I think if there’s somebody that you can lose against, he’s the guy, he’s one of the best doing it. This is definitely not on him, because he wasn’t the guy that was sending all those emails, organizing. So I’m not blaming him for anything. But the organization, they did quite some stuff that wasn’t fair.”

“His team was part of the organization because it was Queensbury [Promotions] and Matchroom [Boxing], those emails were coming to me from them. Those were the people that were sending the schedule, and every day they send everything, the pickup time, the program, the schedule.”

Ngannou will have a chance to compete for a less hostile promotion when he makes his long-awaited PFL debut against Renan Ferreira in October.