Next month, Tyson Fury will come out of retirement for a fifth time, as he eyes up the chance to become a three-time heavyweight ruler, but there is one fellow and active former champion who he believes should have walked away from the sport years ago.

Fury overcame Wladimir Klitschko to become the unified heavyweight world champion back in 2015, but ‘The Gypsy King’ did not defend the throne, with almost three years of inactivity meaning he lost all of the belts.

Yet, after mounting an extraordinary comeback, Fury twice knocked out Deontay Wilder in their rematch and trilogy fights to claim and defend the WBC heavyweight world title – one of the most sensational rivalries in the modern heavyweight era.

Whilst career defining for Fury, those nights were devastating for ‘The Bronze Bomber’, who has now won on just two occasions since 2019, with neither of those triumphs coming against elite operators.

The American hopes to end a run of underwhelming displays when he fights Derek Chisora next month, but Fury told Gareth A. Davies that he believes his old foe should have retired after their final fight.

“Wilder is finished. He should have retired in 2021 after his last defeat [to me], but he didn’t and he has ended up paying the price for small amounts of money, which he probably didn’t really need but whatever. Who am I to say what a man can and cannot earn in his life?

“Listen, I think that once you are gone, you are gone, and he is completely shot to bits. I saw that against Joseph Parker and I saw it against [Zhilei] Zhang.

“When you get older and your timing goes, you lose the ability to pull the trigger – and that is the key to all of it. When you are a one-punch man anyway, and you rely on that one-punch knockout, which got him out of trouble forty-odd times in a row, and that is gone – you are finished, you’re f***ed.”

As a result, when Fury provided his prediction for the contest, he gave Wilder little chance of a victory. Instead, he declared that his belief that ‘Del Boy’ will register a first knockout win since 2019 when the pair go toe-to-toe.

“I think that Chisora stops him. Although, Chisora is older and has probably hard more hard fights, I think he has got more left in the tank.”

Wilder-Chisora takes place on Saturday, April 4, at the O2 Arena in London, in what Chisora maintains will be his final professional contest.