Why Romany double looks on the cards for Tyson Fury and Billy Joe Saunders

The two fighters from travelling backgrounds are in a race to become Britain's first gypsy world champion

Tyson Fury poses for a portrait during a training session at Team Fury Gym (Getty)

The show is billed as “Bad Blood”, and the red stuff should certainly be flowing when four angry men settle their scores in their British and European title fights at London’s ExCel next Saturday night.

Potty-mouthed heavyweight contender Tyson Fury says he can’t wait to lay his fists on chippy champion Dereck Chisora in their twice-delayed return, while middleweight incumbent Billy Joe Saunders is determined to demonstrate that challenger Chris Eubank Jnr is far from the messiah his father claims.

A fascinating sub-plot to these main events is the race between Fury and Saunders to become Britain’s first Romany world champion, as their fights are official eliminators for the sport’s ultimate belts.

Both descendants of bare-knuckle champions, they are contrasting characters not only in physique and personality but lifestyle. The 6ft 9in Fury, 26, is a man of swirling contradictions, censured and heavily fined by the Board of Control for spouting verbal sewage and making homophobic tweets.

Those around him plead that he has an alter ego as quite a nice bloke, yet somehow he always manages to disguise it. How can you take him seriously when he compares himself to Alexander the Great and sneers that Wladimir Klitschko is “a big s***house with a glass chin”?

He may not exactly be a travelling man these days, but Fury will tell you it’s the Romany in him that makes him what he is, coming from a bloodline of fighting Furys going back to the 19th century. He is distantly related to the renowned cobbles scrapper Bartley Gorman, and his father, “Gypsy John”, fought bare-knuckle before becoming a British heavyweight contender.

Billy Joe Saunders (Getty)

While “traveller” might be something of a misnomer, as he has lived on permanent sites since childhood and now resides in a spacious bungalow in Morecambe, Fury remains intensely loyal to his roots: “I’m proud of what I am. To me it is irrelevant whether I live in a house, a caravan or a tent. The traveller background gives you that ultimate fighting steel, the determination to win. There’s no loser in me.”

He airily explains that becoming the first homegrown traveller to win a world title “would not mean anything to me”, a view with which Saunders profoundly disagrees. “It would be making history,” he says.

Saunders, like Fury a family man with young kids, has a luxurious chalet on a travellers’ site in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. An Olympian at 18, he is equally proud of his background. His great-grandfather Absolom Beeney was a bareknuckle champion.

While Fury has a grossly inflated opinion of his own ability, both he and the 30-year-old Chisora are in better shape than when they last fought, three years ago, and it seems probable Fury has the edge again.

However, it is the explosive collision between Saunders and Eubank Jnr, both 25 and unbeaten, which has us licking our lips. Saunders says of Eubank: “I can’t wait to see the look on his father’s face when I beat him.”

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