Boxing Rostrum

So Mayweather and Hatton are going to box each other in December. Or at least the deal has been agreed “in principle.” That has to be good for boxing. A match between the two has been mooted ever since Ricky came on the scene by beating Kostya Tszyu a couple of years back and, with both men still undefeated, the fight has massive appeal. And huge significance. But, if it actually comes off, will the action live up to the label?

I don’t think we need ask that of a comparable attraction set for Madison Square Garden in November. Miguel Cotto against Sugar Shane Mosley. Given their respective qualities and positive intent, that one can’t be anything other than a thriller. Like everybody else, I want to see what unfolds when and if Floyd meets Ricky in Vegas but if I could only get to witness one of these two fights it would be the one in New York.

Gavin Rees is into his third full day as WBA light welterweight champion of the world. It will take some getting used to. For me, that is. Even though victory justified his presence in the ring against Souleymane M’Baye at Cardiff, I’m still trying to figure out how a guy like Rees got a title shot in the first place.

Gavin’s record before Saturday was 26-0 in just shy of nine years as a pro. Fancy looking numbers, it’s true, but they’d been compiled against bread and butter triers, mainly in eight round and six round bouts. His final outing prior to tangling with M’Baye was a six rounds points win over Billy Smith, who had lost forty seven of his fifty six fights. Final eliminator material it was not.

There’s nothing in the five foot three Welshman’s entire log to warrant the opportunity that just came his way, but come his way it did, and the tiny terror certainly made the most of it. Rees came out busy, throwing fast clusters, and kept on buzzing all night long to win it pretty big on all three cards.

Gavin Rees didn’t capture the world heavyweight title in Cardiff, and there’s only one Cinderella Man anyway, but I’m sure Jim Braddock would have moved over a bit to make room for a little ‘un because this was a fairy tale come true in its own right too, even allowing for the abysmal performance of Souleymane M’Baye.

Seventy two years ago, after Braddock had beaten Max Baer in the fabled upset, Max said, “Best of luck to Jim. He needs the money. He’s got three kids. I don’t know how many I’ve got.” Losing the title hurt, and humour was Baer’s way of dealing with it.

Hard to say what M’Baye’s method is. After the judges unanimously took away his title and gave it to Gavin Rees he couldn’t even raise enough emotion to show disappointment on his face. If anything, he looked indifferent. Or maybe he was just in shock, not at the verdict but at his non-contribution to what had gone before.

Off hand, I can’t think of a worse display by a defending world champion. It really was pisspoor, especially given Souleymane’s big reach advantage and naturally superior skills and technique.

But Gavin won’t be concerned by any of that. He went in there and seized the moment, and here’s hoping he enjoys the fruits of it while he can. They can take away the title, and somebody soon will – next time up I would think – but nobody can ever take away the achievement.

Gavin Rees, WBA light welterweight champion of the world. Stranger things have happened. But not very often.

Michael Katsidis doesn’t bother himself with boxing’s basic skills, does he. The Aussie just sets up a firestorm and expects everything in its path to get burned, sooner or later. It certainly makes for an exciting spectacle. Buy a ticket for a Katsidis fight and value is guaranteed.

Trouble is, Michael has no defence. He’s had things his way so far, and would give anybody a physical challenge, but the real craftsmen in this game will surely smother his attacks and pick him apart. That much seemed clear to me when I watched him stop Graham Earl in an up and down thriller at Wembley, and the view was strengthened on Saturday in the Amonsot fight. He’ll get found out at top level. That simple.

Just because I don’t believe Michael Katsidis is good enough to become a genuine world champ doesn’t mean I’m denigrating the guy. He’s a breath of fresh air in the game today. You can’t help but admire and respect the kind of commitment he brings to his fights. What I can’t help but object to, though, is how Katsidis came to pick up something called the WBO interim lightweight title for beating Earl in London, a title he then defended against Czar Amonsot. I mean, what the donald’s all that about?

According to my dictionary, interim means temporary, provisional, or partial. It might be sensible to bestow such a status on someone in a situation where the real champ is long term incapacitated and the title would otherwise stagnate but, at the time Katsidis captured his “interim” belt, Acelino Freitas was the fully credited WBO lightweight king. Now Juan Diaz is.

Stands to reason that any one sanctioning body can only have one champion in any one division at any one time, silly prefixes notwithstanding. But, in modern boxing, what are the chances of reason being allowed to get in the way of farcical administration?

Enzo Maccarinelli beat former WBC champ Wayne Braithwaite in Cardiff last night to keep his WBO cruiserweight title and advance his claim to be the division’s best.

Braithwaite was Enzo’s toughest test yet, and he came through with flying colours, but it wasn’t easy. Despite getting a landslide nod on all three cards, Maccarinelli had to fight hard and keep maximum concentration all the way. Wayne was a rough handful and always posed a threat.

Both these men can bang. General expectation was that the fight was unlikely to go the distance and the possibility of a sudden ending at any time made for a tense atmosphere. When Big Truck got dumped in the fifth it seemed the end might well be nigh, but he survived the follow up attack and it proved to be the only knockdown. Credit both men for that.. They each had to absorb some brutal blows.

On this showing, Braithwaite can stay in boxing and still give the top cruisers a hard go, but Maccarinelli is the one with a future.

The Welshman is a good boxer and an exciting fighter, and gets better and better. His thumping left jab put him in charge of this fight, and he could probably have beaten Wayne Braithwaite by utilizing that punch and just boxing conservatively behind it, but Enzo is not satisfied with merely winning. He wants his victories to be emphatic. He’s a fans fighter.

At six feet and four inches, Maccarinelli is a tall cruiserweight but he’s also a natural cruiserweight. He was more than five pounds inside the division limit for this bout and has no problem whatever making that requirement, unlike fellow Brit David Haye who has to sweat blood to hit two hundred pounds.

Haye boxes Jean Marc Mormeck for the WBC and WBA titles in Paris in September and is more than bullish about what’s going to happen. He says he can’t wait to appear in front of a house of Frenchman and “bang out their boy early doors.”

I’m not saying Haye can’t do exactly that, but I am saying the road to disaster is paved with complacent attitudes. I reckon David Haye is taking an awful lot for granted when it comes to that Gallic mission. And his confidence is based on something that’s not even relevant.

By knocking out the Pole, Tomasz Bonin, in the opening round of what was his first bout as a professional against a full blown heavyweight of any quality, Haye seems to think he’s turned into Superman. He might be getting a bit ahead of himself there.

David weighed 217 for the Bonin fight. He was obviously relaxed and content at that poundage, and there’s no denying the terrific job he did in blowing away a tough man, but when he climbs through the ropes in Paris he won’t be 217, will he. It will be the first time for ten months that he’s had to squeeze down to 200. A totally different proposition. And he’ll be in with a champion who knows what to expect from the Englishman and will be prepared accordingly.

David Haye will move up to heavyweight permanently after Paris and if he wants to make the move having won a world cruiser crown he’d better start taking Monsieur Mormeck a damn sight more seriously than he has so far.

On the same night John Duddy took his record to 21-0 (16 kayos) with a late stoppage over Alessio Furlan in Dublin, middleweight rival Giovanni Lorenzo went 25-0 (17) by banging out Sherwin Davis on the big Atlantic City card.

With Lorenzo, from the Dominican Republic, and Irishman Duddy both based in New York City, a clash between the pair might be seen as a natural. Lorenzo seems to think as much. He’s called for the fight. No bad mouthing involved, just an invitation to get it on.

I don’t doubt that John Duddy’s belief in his own abilities is absolute, and he’d probably be happy to oblige if the decision were his to make, but I’d be more than surprised if Team Duddy agreed to that match any time soon.

Had they stayed put in the States, boxing wise, instead of opting for this Irish campaign, a scrap with Lorenzo would have been hard to avoid now that the gauntlet’s been thrown down. From three thousand miles away, though, ignoring that challenge doesn’t have the same lose-face factor.

John Duddy is due to box again in Belfast next month. Don’t expect him to be confronted by anybody too threatening.

Watching Arturo Gatti being beaten up by Alfonso Gomez was about as sad as it gets. Not because I have anything against Alfonso but because Gatti shouldn’t have been in there at all.

Arturo looked a shot fighter against Mayweather two years ago. Even though Floyd was lightning quick and punch perfect on the night, and would have whipped Gatti on any night, you’d have expected Thunder to at least throw a few punches back. But he couldn’t even manage that. Retirement should have been the call – there and then.

Arturo wouldn’t accept the situation. Maybe he just didn’t want that to be the people’s last memory of him. If that were the case, though, he could have called it a career on a winning note after licking Denmark’s Thomas Damgaard on his ring return seven months later. Instead he took the match with Carlos Baldomir for the welterweight title. And got a beating.

Baldomir is nothing extraordinary, just a strong and solid guy who’s in your face and keeps clumping away, but he was far too much for what was left of Arturo Gatti. No shame in losing to a bigger, stronger man in a world championship bout but when a guy like Gatti is taking shots that should never be landing, even in the early rounds while he’s still fresh, you know it’s very definitely a fight too far.

That realization must have dawned on Gatti himself, as well as the entire audience, but there he was again last Saturday, a whole year later, taking on Alfonso Gomez.

Could be Team Gatti thought it was a safe option. It wasn’t, though, was it. Gomez went straight out there and applied pressure, kept the punches coming in the style of a yesteryear fighter, and Gatti fell apart under the sustained assault.

Arturo wasn’t going to quit, so the ref or his corner crew should have made that decision on his behalf. Not that intervention is that easy. Maybe Mickey Ward, brought in for this fight, felt he’d be betraying Gatti somehow by pulling him out of there, no matter how bad the situation. But Randy Neumann should surely have jumped in and saved Arturo from at least half of the final barrage that battered him down in the seventh.

Who’d be a ref, eh? Seems they usually cop flak from somewhere whenever they stop a fight, and in this case, with Gatti having come back from the brink so many times before in his fighting life, Neumann’s judgement may have been a little clouded. If he gets the benefit of any doubt there, though, what the hell was he doing taking up a count over the stricken boxer. Had Gatti somehow managed to drag himself upright, Neumann was giving every indication he’d have let it continue. Madness. Fair play to Larry Hazzard, then, for reading that possibility and climbing into the ring himself to call it off.

The annals of boxing won’t forget Arturo Gatti’s contribution. He was a good and very exciting performer, and right up there on the braveheart leaderboard. Sad, though, that he had to have that couple of fights too many.

A few hours before Gatti fell to Gomez in Atlantic City, Londoner Nicky Cook was likewise finding out that courage alone is not a winning quality in the boxing ring.

Cook wasn’t washed up like Arturo. British, European, and Commonwealth champ, he had an unblemished log boasting twenty seven straight wins and, going in to box Steve Luevano for the vacant WBO featherweight title, Nicky had all the confidence that those kind of numbers bring. In this game, though, bare numbers don’t actually mean much, do they.

Once the bell rang, Cook’s winning numbers didn’t mean anything at all. He was completely outclassed, and his desperation must have been all the greater because Luevano, on paper at least, hadn’t looked anything special himself beforehand.

The slick, southpaw Californian proved a fine judge of distance, ramming his jab into Cook’s face from the off but never letting Nicky establish his own lead at any time. The gulf between the two was obvious even in the course of a fairly uneventful opening round, and after Luevano dropped Cook in the second with a left that skidded off the top of his head, the die was well and truly cast.

Luevano increased Cook’s distress by bringing a body attack into play and the whole thing became a terrible ordeal for the home boy who had gone in believing he couldn’t lose.

Ten out of ten for guts, though. Cut and bruised and knocked about by a better skilled boxer, Nicky Cook fought his heart out trying to find some sort of success, but even when he did force his way up close in the middle rounds his work was wild and ineffective and left the calm man in front of him unperturbed.

When Cook was knocked down by another body shot in the eleventh round, and stayed down, it came as a relief. I don’t think Nicky could possibly have given any more.

I felt sorry for Arturo Gatti last Saturday night. I felt sorry for Nicky Cook too. But, mostly, I felt admiration. They both got battered, but kept on going. That kind of heart and desire is one thing that doesn’t have a price.

Paul Williams was taken into the tenth round before he was able to get rid of Walter Matthysse a year ago. When Antonio Margarito and Kermit Cintron had their attritional meeting it was Margarito who imposed himself and completed the victory inside five rounds.

Last Saturday night those pairings were shuffled and we had Margarito against Williams while Cintron took on Matthysse.

Kermit Cintron was hugely impressive in knocking out the Argentinian. He dropped Matthysse at the end of the opener, then poleaxed him at the start of the second with a savage combination that was lightning fast and deadly accurate. The loser was never in with a chance.

The implications of that, logically speaking, were obvious. Margarito had destroyed Cintron, who had now annihilated Walter Matthysse, while that same Matthyse had battled away for almost the full schedule against Williams. So Margarito should have it over Paul Williams, right?

Wrong. Margarito couldn’t do a damn thing with Williams through the opening rounds, and didn’t enjoy enough success later on to pull back the deficit. Williams is so big it’s hard to believe he’s a welterweight. Supposedly, there is only a two inch difference in height between the two men, though it looked much more, but it was the challenger’s nine inch reach advantage that caused most problems for a frustrated champion.

Paul didn’t utilize his reach by running, or even running and jabbing. He was throwing with both hands, and they weren’t just taps. A lot of Williams’ stuff got blocked but the ones that got through were proper punches and the ones that missed amounted to a field of flak that Margarito could find no way past.

After six rounds I thought Antonio needed to win the whole of the second half just to square things up. He didn’t do that. There was a fightback and he did put rounds in the bank when it went to infighting where he was the boss, but even then Margarito didn’t dominate in the manner Williams had earlier. And Paul Williams clearly won round twelve.

Despite Margarito’s protests, this fight had the right winner, and new champ. And if they were to box each other again, I’d pick The Punisher to repeat. Paul seems to me to have Antonio’s number.

What about Kermit Cintron, though? Kermit got bashed up by Margarito, and no excuses, so that doesn’t make it likely he’d be a threat to Margarito’s conqueror, does it. But it could turn out that Cintron’s particular abilities, and fast, vicious punches, are just what’s needed to bring Paul Williams down.

With Willie Limond’s jaw damaged and his nose perhaps busted too, the decision to pull him out after eight rounds in the company of Amir Khan was the right one, and something of a relief to those who feared Willie might be seriously harmed if allowed to continue.

From a mercenary perspective, the timing of Limond’s withdrawal was also a huge relief to me, and to anyone out there who had taken my advice that this fight was a good thing to be over inside eight and a half rounds and should be bet on accordingly.

As the action unfolded, Wilbur Wood’s anti-betting mantra kept banging away in my head and even though I and my fellow believers did in the end fill our boots on the outcome it was one stressful way to boost the coffers.

I underestimated Willie Limond. I knew he was a decent boxer, and I knew he’d give it the big try, but the quality and intensity of his performance went beyond any of my expectations, based on what I’d seen from him before.

Limond didn’t allow Khan to drive him back and bully him. Willie tried to hold his ground and slip or block punches while staying in range to let his own shots go at every opportunity. Pro experience coming into play. This was a man who had a plan and was in there executing it just fine. Through six rounds the long odds underdog was in with a real chance of winning this fight.

In the sixth round itself, Limond came close to ending it there and then. He had Khan on the floor and hurt, and at ringside Amir’s mother went into praying mode while the rest of his assembled family showed varying degrees of alarm. When Khan got up, the Scot was on him straight away and Amir may well have been only a solid shot or two away from having the ref jump in, but he survived the session and then turned everything around.

In the seventh, Khan suddenly found Limond with long punches that drove him to the ropes and sent him sprawling. The fight was over at that point, as a contest. The decisive damage had been done. Limond climbed back up but from there on it was Amir dishing it out and Willie taking it.

Amir Khan showed a couple of things that bode well for his future in the ring. For one, he’s got a warrior’s heart. That’s a necessity for anyone aspiring to the top level of boxing competition and we now know it’s there. And Amir’s punching power is becoming something to fear judged by the bone breaking properties displayed in London on Saturday night.

The big worry now, though, is the Khan chin. If he can be knocked down and put in real trouble by a relatively light hitter, how will he cope against the heavy handed types who’ll be waiting for him higher up that ladder.

With Wladimir having proved himself a superior fighter to Lamon Brewster you’d think the Klitschko clan would be happy to celebrate the fact and leave it at that. Not so.

Vitali Klitschko felt it necessary to make a spiteful reference to the first fight between his huge little brother and Brewster at the Mandalay Bay. Not prepared to give Lamon any credit for his sensational victory in that one, he said Wladimir’s crushing win last Saturday “ proved that three years ago he lost to Brewster due to an outside influence.”

Pathetic insinuations of skullduggery, or dark forces at work.

Here’s something for the elder Klitschko to choke on. The only dark forces present that night were inside Lamon Brewster’s glove – a pair of left hooks that landed right on the Waterford Crystal. End of story. End of message.

As well as being a long standing WBO cruiserweight title holder, which brought him some international respect, recently retired Johnny Nelson was also at one time the WBF heavyweight champion of the world. That’s not something he boasts about. In fact, he never mentions it at all. The embarrassment factor must be altogether too much.

On Friday in South Africa, after a five year absence from professional boxing, Francois Botha laced them up again. The once useful thirty eight year old, now seven years on from getting massacred by Lennox Lewis, beat big Bob Mirovic, who has never been anything but a journeyman, over twelve rounds in a fight that meant little to anybody except the two boxers themselves.

Correction. It meant plenty to our old pals at the WBF who ludicrously approved Botha v Mirovic as being for something called the interim world heavyweight title. So the White Buffalo now has the same title, sort of, that Johnny Nelson briefly held in silence and still keeps quiet about today. Shouldn’t think Botha will be making too much noise either. Looking for a unification fight on the strength of his new trinket would make Frans a bigger laughing stock than the WBF itself although, in truth, that would scarcely be possible.

Lamon Brewster tried his best but was hopelessly outclassed by a Wladimir Klitschko who never let him get into the fight. Lamon was taking a beating, and things would have got worse still had Buddy McGirt not pulled his man out at the half way mark. Championship bout or not, it was the right decision.

Wladimir is a formidable and destructive boxer. There’s no denying that. Offensively, he may even be as good as Manny Steward says he is, and his defence isn’t bad either. He still doesn’t get the total package tick for me, though.

Stoppage losses to Corrie Sanders and Brewster remain black marks on Klitschko’s log, and the way he ran out of gas altogether in his first career defeat by journeyman Ross Puritty doesn’t put him in a good light either.

Excepting Rocky Marciano, everybody has setbacks. It’s how you overcome them that counts. Maybe Wladimir Klitschko can put his behind him and go on to greatness, but I’m not convinced. He’s capitulated three times so far and on two of those occasions he folded tamely after being in total charge. That’s a worry.

More worrying still was the way he performed in his bout with Samuel Peter. Despite Peter offering little more than a slow forward plod, and notwithstanding a comfortable points victory at the end, Klitschko spent the whole fight looking paranoid at the possibility of getting hit and found himself on the floor three times in the course of it. And he didn’t go down from full contact blows. The punches that dropped him had already expended most of their power in transit, barely reaching the target, but Wladimir still hit the deck anyway.

I’m not denigrating the guy. Wladimir Klitschko is a devastating fighter for sure. Maybe he can now go out there and do to everybody else what he just did to braveheart Brewster. That would be a reasonable expectation if boxing were just about ability and making use of physical advantages. But it isn’t, is it. There’s more to it than that.

Wladimir isn’t going to put himself in the great category until he’s at least once been in a real struggle and come out on top. Up to now he’s failed that particular test three out of three.

Lamon Brewster has a big punch and an even bigger heart. Trouble is, if the first of those doesn’t get rid of Wladimir Klitschko tonight, the second is likely to see him getting hurt beyond the call of duty.

It’s Brewster’s first time back since losing the WBO title by unanimous decision to Serguei Lyakhovich fifteen months ago. He suffered a detached retina in the first round of that fight but, despite the handicap of not being able to see on the port side, never stopped trying and even had Lyakhovich drop to a knee in the seventh.

That was some performance by a one eyed fighter, but typical of the man. Lamon has no quit in him. He’d shown the same courage against Kali Meehan, having his jaw broken in the eighth round but battling on through the full dozen to eke out a split decision win.

That Meehan fight, though, again demonstrated that Brewster’s boxing skills are not of the highest quality. Kali is very limited, technically, yet Lamon could never get control of the situation at any stage, even prior to the jaw break, and the outcome was in doubt all the way. And in his other two career losses, aside from the Lyakhovich defeat, Brewster was widely outpointed by Clifford Etienne and Charles Shufford, both decent but unexceptional practitioners.

Wladimir Klitschko is much more accomplished and menacing than any of those, so it’s reasonable for us to believe that Lamon Brewster can’t possibly go in there and outbox the guy. But we know he can beat Klitschko because he’s done it before. And that’s what gives tonight’s bout just that little bit of fascination even though Wladimir is a strong favourite.

The younger Klitschko is probably the best on-top heavyweight in the world. When he’s flowing and dominating a guy, Wladimir looks awesome, and Lamon Brewster surely can’t afford to let him get into that kind of groove or he’ll face the prospect of a sustained long range beating.

The best punches in boxing are straight punches. Straight punches get to the target quicker and are, by design, more accurate than anything that’s thrown in a curve. Klitschko has mastered the ramrod jab, and he drives that right of his straight down the middle with power and precision. Owned by a fighter with his reach, they are both mighty weapons.

Manny Steward says Wladimir can be a great heavyweight, and an outstanding champion. He certainly has the size and the power, and the tools, to fulfil that claim but I’ll never be completely sold on the guy because no matter how Klitschko is coached or conditioned the one thing he’ll never have is a Hall of Fame chin.

I have to go with the consensus and pick Klitschko to win this fight because his boxing ability is far superior to what Lamon Brewster has to offer and he’ll be going into the ring with a perfect prep behind him. Lamon, on the other hand, has to be at least a little rusty after the long absence and, if only subconsciously, must have concerns about his left eye and whether it can stand up to the kind of stuff that will be landing on it tonight.

After what happened before we can be sure that Klitschko is totally focused on his job this time. He already knows what Brewster’s left hook can do to him if he gets careless and will want to take it out of the equation by, as Manny Steward says, controlling the fight from the outside with his own left.

Lamon may well decide that the best way to fight this guy is to jump straight on him like he did with Golota. A risky ploy against such a powerful man as Wladimir, but Brewster really needs to lay some hurt on him early and he’s not likely to achieve that by orthodox boxing methods. A do or die approach would appear to be his one chance of a repeat victory.

For me, a Brewster win would be every bit as big a shock as it was the first time around. I just can’t see it happening. I wouldn’t be unhappy if it did, though, because Lamon Brewster is my kind of fighter. He has that unquenchable spirit inside him that, for all his indisputable talents, I just don’t see in Wladimir Klitschko.

Old time fight scribe Wilbur Wood liked to end a column with the words, “Don’t bet on fights.” In the volatile world of boxing, where it’s prudent to expect the unexpected, that is generally good advice.

Once in a while, though, the book throws up odds about a fight that are impossible to resist. We’ve got one of those on July 14th at the O2 Arena in London.

It’s an impressive looking bill, with several meaningful contests scheduled, but the fight for betting purposes has to be Willie Limond’s defence of the Commonwealth lightweight crown against Amir Khan.

Limond is a decent boxer and a seasoned pro, and has lost just once in twenty nine. That was four years ago to Alex Arthur. Willie is no mug, and what he’s defending on the night is a proper traditional title, of which he’s very proud, not one of those tawdry mickey mouse baubles that infest the game today, but he’s got a real job on here.

Amir Khan is a rare talent. In two years he’s made the transition from amateur phenomenon to hugely exciting professional, with the promise of very much more to come. It’s hard to put a limit on Amir’s potential.

Now that Khan is growing into his man’s strength his punches are carrying more zip, but he’s added that power without compromising on speed. And he’s started exploring the whole target, up and down, looking for places to do the most damage. Could be the complete boxer in the making.

Amir hasn’t beaten much yet and it’s fair to say he still has it to prove at a higher level, but there’s reason to think he’ll excel even more when pitted against someone with ambition who is in there to win and not just last it out. Willie Limond wears that label.

If Limond could bang this would have to be considered a genuine test for Khan in just his thirteenth contest. But Limond is not a banger. And while Amir has yet to face real quality in the ring, Willie hasn’t been set too many daunting tasks himself. Alex Arthur was easily his most capable foe, and Arthur stopped him in eight rounds.

That Arthur loss was at super feather. Limond has since stepped up a weight, but that’s a minus because Amir Khan is a genuine lightweight, and a big lightweight at that. Amir is three inches taller than the Scot and has the reach on him, and is faster and heavier handed. Experience is the only area where Willie gets the tick over Khan.

Willie Limond is a neat orthodox boxer who scoots about with his hands held high. He’ll be moving side to side, looking to make Khan miss and then hopefully get his attention, and respect, with sharp counters. It’s possible Limond has what it takes to make that work for a while, and it’s possible Khan will become frustrated and ragged if he doesn’t get his own way from the start, but neither is likely in my view.

Amir Khan doesn’t do reconnaissance. He goes straight to work. I see Amir hounding his man around the ring, headhunting to have Willie keep that guard of his nice and high, then looking to do what he did to Steffy Bull last time out – and what Ricky Hatton did to Castillo – hit him down below, where the love handles are on you and me. Whether it’s upstairs or downstairs, though, I expect Khan to be way too much and to take his first title in crushing fashion. And that’s where the betting angle comes in.

Totesport have the total rounds for this pegged at under or over 8.5 rounds. The odds for either eventuality are 5/6. You don’t even have to pick the winner, just nominate how long the action will last. Whichever way I look at this fight I can’t see Willie Limond fending Amir Khan off for more than six rounds, and that's a generous allowance. My best advice? Go to www.totesport.com and fill your boots. I already have.