ECHO exclusive as Connor O’Neill chats to Ben Shalom ahead of Natasha Jonas against Ivana Habazin on Saturday night
Boxxer chief Ben Shalom has explained why it took so long to get Natasha Jonas back in the ring as well as revealing he takes no notice of what her trainer has to say. Jonas finally returns to the ring on Saturday night when she takes on Ivana Habazin in a huge welterweight world title unification fight at the Exhibition Centre.
The 40-year-old hasn’t fought since she beat Mikaela Mayer back in January and only managed to fight once in 2023, after a whirlwind 2022 in which she boxed three times. But speaking exclusively to the ECHO, Shalom has explained that because of Jonas’s standing in boxing, fights are a lot tougher to make.
“You know what? She has had back-to-back world title fights, and then it gets to the point where there are only world title fights out for her,” he explained.
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“So things have to fall into place. There is no point in going backwards at her point in her career; it is either unification or the big nights.
“There was another fight we tried to make, but we couldn’t get it over the line. We thought about going directly into the Lauren vs Tasha fight, but the two teams weren’t keen.
“We want to unify the welterweight division and have one undisputed world champion, so in the end we managed to get Habazin to agree to come over to Liverpool.”
Joe Gallagher, Jonas’s trainer and manager, hit out at the way she had been treated by Boxxer last month and revealed he had told the former Team GB star to retire. Asked by the ECHO about Gallagher’s comments, Shalom replied: “To be honest, I don’t pay too much attention to Joe. He will moan whatever happens.
“I think if you look at what happened to Tasha before she joined us and what happened, she had never won a world title, she has won five with us.
“Of course you want fights to happen quickly, but at her level, as you see with Savannah Marshall and Katie Taylor, they are not fighting as regularly as they did coming through.
“We had to wait for the right opportunity, but obviously I am delighted that it comes before Christmas and that everything has come together with the division.”
Before he continued: “Sometimes you forget; when she first came over, we couldn’t get her any fights; we had to mess around with different weight divisions.
“We went up to super-welterweight to get her first world title, and it was tough, but she has gone on a run and collected many more world titles.”
