SEND IN THE CLOWNS

By Frank Warren

The circus rolled into West Kensington on Saturday night and two all too familiar clowns, once again, were providing the comedy at London’s Olympia, the one-time alma mater of Bertram Mills.

They told us the one about wanting to fight Gennady Golovkin before chipping in with further one-liners about Billy Joe Saunders and James DeGale.

The assembled post-performance audience should’ve been rolling in the aisles, but somehow kept straight faces and seemed to take them seriously.

We keep getting fed all this bullshit by Eubank and son and what astounds me is that certain tabloid journalists who should know better are digesting it too.

People have short memories if they cannot recall fights against the current world middleweight champions being presented to the Eubanks on a plate.

It is just they have a remarkable reluctance to actually sign a contract for a big fight when it is put in front of them.

The old man and the kid keep throwing out all these names, but they won’t fight any of them.

For them it is simply about generating publicity. When it comes down to business, the fact of the matter is, the old boy doesn’t want to risk his meal ticket.

He keeps banging on about ‘the other promoters’ trying to get their claws into his boy, but it beats me how he comes to that conclusion.

In my dealings with them, I never made any secret that I was always in the Billy Joe Saunders business. It was a painstaking process making the fight in 2014. He even asked me to become Jnr’s paid advisor – which I declined. But it was a fight the public enjoyed so it made sense to try and do it again.

We’ve come close to crossing the line with it on a few occasions, but they wouldn’t sign so we’ve moved on. Tommy Langford was mandatory for Eubank jnr’s British title, we signed a contract and they pulled out and vacated the title.

So we moved on again. Our attempts to do business with them have always been about trying to make a good fight for our fighters. End of.

Matchroom don’t appear too fussed about having him on the books either, so I am not sure where all this ‘other promoters’ stuff comes from.

Yet still they keep calling out the same names, now adding the spurious claim that the belt Eubank jnr collected on Saturday is some sort of ticket towards the big fights.

The IBO title? Who gives a toss!

Eubank keeps filling his pen with invisible ink for a reason. It is because they know he would never beat Billy Joe and would never beat Golovkin.

He just doesn’t carry the power and is easy to hit. Even Renold Quinlan managed to clip him on Saturday.

This the same Quinlan who the old man said in the build up he believed to be more dangerous than Golovkin. He was an 11-1 novice and it is staggering that nobody even questioned such a ludicrous statement.

Typical of the nonsense is a report this week suggesting Daniel Jacobs is the new favourite for the next stop of the big top in April.

As resilient as Jacobs may be, I doubt very much he will fight Golovkin on March 18 and then hop over to meet Eubank in April.

And I seem to recall this is the same Jacobs who he was ordered to fight before but then opted to give it a swerve to fight for Nick Blackwell’s British title.

It is the same old story over and over again where Eubank and decent opponents are concerned.

The circus will doubtless roll on to its next destination, but the greatest show on earth it certainly ain’t.

More from Frank tomorrow on Hughie Fury’s bid for glory