Tyson Fury suspects that he’ll never fight Anthony Joshua at this point.

Fury feels that if Joshua truly wanted to challenge him in what would’ve been billed as the biggest fight in British boxing history, even with Joshua coming off back-to-back losses to Oleksandr Usyk, they would be preparing to go at it Saturday night in London. Instead, the undefeated Fury and Dereck Chisora will square off for the third time before a crowd expected to approach 70,000 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

The 34-year-old Fury wants to fight three times in 2023. The WBC champion seemingly ruled out Joshua (24-3, 22 KOs) as one of the three opponents he’ll box because Fury (32-0-1, 23 KOs) doesn’t think the former IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO champion has the fortitude to step in the ring with him.

“No, because he’s a coward,” Fury told BoxingScene.com. “If Joshua was gonna fight me, he would’ve took like $40 million to do it on the 3rd of December. And instead, he sh!t himself and run away like a little bitch. But I don’t blame him because I was gonna spank his little ass all over the TV. And he wouldn’t have been able to walk around with his muscles and all that sh!t.

“He’s happy now that he can say, ‘I lost a split decision to a middleweight.’ He’s happy with that. But if he gets carved up off the canvas, and you have to scrape him up with an egg flipper, he can’t walk around with [confidence] then because he’s absolutely destroyed.”

The “middleweight” to whom Fury referred is Usyk, the unbeaten Ukrainian southpaw who beat Joshua by split decision in their 12-round rematch August 20 at Jeddah Superdome in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Usyk (20-0, 13 KOs), who was once the fully unified cruiserweight champion, upset Joshua by unanimous decision in their first fight, a 12-rounder that occurred in September 2021 at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

“Joshua’s a bum,” Fury said. “He’s an old bodybuilding piece of sh!t, a sh!thouse coward. Because the guy beat the coward doesn’t mean he’s a fighting man. The man’s a coward, an absolute coward. No balls. We call it a lack of grit, lack of balls. Anybody can beat him. Andy Ruiz beat him on three weeks’ notice. You don’t need to be in great shape to beat a big bodybuilder.”

Fury scoffed when informed Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s outspoken promoter, stated recently that he wants the British superstar to fight Dillian Whyte, Fury and former WBC champion Deontay Wilder all in 2023.

“Eddie Hearn can suck my d!ck because he’s a piece of sh!t,” Fury said. “I don’t care what Eddie Hearn says. It’s irrelevant.”

An incredulous Fury doesn’t believe Joshua will ever fight Wilder, the knockout artist Fury viciously knocked out in the 11th round of their third fight 13 months ago at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

“No, because he’s a coward,” Fury said. “And you’re not gonna fight a man like Wilder if you’re a coward.”

The heavily favored Fury, meanwhile, will headline a BT Sport Box Office pay-per-view show in the United Kingdom and Ireland when he encounters Chisora (33-12, 23 KOs) for the third time Saturday night (6 p.m. GMT; £24.95). The 12-round battle between Manchester’s Fury and London’s Chisora also will be the main event of a fight-five stream by ESPN+ in the United States (1 p.m. ET; 10 a.m. PT).

Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.