IBF welterweight world champion Natasha Jonas is ready to resume her rivalry with Mikaela Mayer, and considers the verbal barbs multi-weight world championship star Claressa Shields slings her way; Jonas says talks with Shields led to nothing and are now finished once and for all
Saturday 7 September 2024 17:10, UK
Natasha Jonas is still waiting to set her next world title defence.
The Liverpool star edged out Mikaela Mayer in a thrilling IBF welterweight championship clash in January.
Both Mayer and Jonas wanted to rematch but a deal did not come to fruition. "It's not us holding it up," Jonas said.
"We said yes straight away. I said yes, I've been talking to her team, obviously because I manage myself and we've tried to make it happen."
She wants to fight Mayer a second time to leave no doubt that she deserved the decision in their first fight.
"That's what I believed I could do. I beat her the first time, I'd beat her more convincingly the second," she told Sky Sports.
In the interim Mayer will take on Sandy Ryan for the WBO welterweight belt on September 28 in New York.
Mayer isn't the only American to have started up a rivalry with Jonas. Brilliant multi-weight champion Claressa Shields hasn't hesitated to throw jibes at the Briton on social media.
"She seems to find an offence in absolutely everything," Jonas laughed. "Just have a day off, have one day off.
"I get it because there's no one she can fight left. So she's got to talk her way into fights because there's none for her, unless she wants to go to PFL," she added. "That's the kind of shame of it. At these lighter weights, there's a lot more competition.
"At her weight division, there's only a handful of athletes who, with respect, are any good and she's beat them all."
Their negotiations to fight have previously fallen through, primarily due to a failure to agree on the weight they'd box at.
Jonas was a unified champion at super-welterweight who has now moved down to welter. Shields was an undisputed champion at middleweight and most recently fought all the way up at light-heavyweight.
"She hadn't been at 154lbs for a very long time and I was barely 148lbs and they said if she doesn't make it, can we make it a catchweight at 156 or 158 and I said, well no, because I'm nowhere near 154lbs. So her own team wasn't confident that she could make the 154lb limit," Jonas explained.
"After the 154lbs talks fell through, for me it was done and dusted. It was that simple, she wasn't going to come down, I wasn't going to go up. So it was done."
Jonas is 40 years old. She won't box many more times and when she does it will need to be in high-profile bouts or world title unifications. But there are still more contests to come.
"There's definitely not a few but there might be one or two. Between now and never," she said.
"There's no reason to fight [just] anybody. I want to be in the big fights. I want to have the big nights and you need to have another big name for you to do that."
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