TAYLOR MADE
Unification dream is alive but injury casts doubt over the date
KATIE TAYLOR’s plan to defend her WBA lightweight crown in the United States before Christmas may be scuppered by the eye injury she sustained in her gruelling 10-round war with Anahi Sanchez on Saturday night.
Taylor won her first world title as a professional in a unanimous decision but needed two stitches over her eye after a clash of heads.
It puts in jeopardy a possible bout against Jessica McCaskill, which was pencilled in for Chicago on December 16.
‘I would like to fight before Christmas just to end the year on a high and I was hoping to do so but I don’t know if that is going to be possible now with this cut,’ Taylor conceded.
Her camp confirmed yesterday that they will know by the middle of this week if she will be able to fight in December.
Saturday’s bout was her seventh in a whirlwind first 11 months as a professional and Taylor, who has become the first Irish boxer to be a world champion at amateur and professional level, admits that her schedule may have to slow down as she will now be facing better fighters.
The Bray native did, however, reiterate her ambition to become unified lightweight champion.
‘If I am going to be in tough
COLIN FARRELL wanted to walk Katie Taylor to the ring at the Principality Stadium on Saturday night. Ireland’s new world champion respectfully declined the offer or, as her manager Brian Peters put it: ‘We almost had him but Katie let him off the hook.’
In professional boxing, celebrity endorsement may not matter as much as Taylor’s sensational ring-craft but it is still important, especially across the Atlantic, where the new WBA lightweight champion’s immediate future looks set to be.
Promoter Eddie Hearn is keen to keep the link between Taylor and Anthony Joshua. ‘Breaking America’ is the next step for the world heavyweight champion which means the bright lights of Las Vegas MGM and Madison Square Garden are on the horizon for Taylor, where even a Hollywood superstar like Farrell will be just another celebrity fan.
For her part, Taylor is eager to remain twinned with Joshua. ‘Absolutely, yeah. I can’t wait for Anthony Joshua to be on my undercard!’ the Bray native laughed.
She might have been joking but that may not have seemed that outlandish to many of the 75,000 fight fans who spilled onto Cardiff’s streets just before midnight, in a futile hunt for a taxi. Having left a world heavyweight title bout, many were talking about women’s boxing. And the new WBA lightweight champion.
It was the best fight on the card for most of those who had seen it (there were around 55,000 in the stadium by the time a steely-eyed Taylor entered the ring to the strains of ‘Thunderstruck’.) And Taylor’s perfectly-executed left hook to Anahi Sanchez’s ribs, which floored the Argentine in the second round, was probably the single most impressive shot of the whole card.
It was another night when Taylor proved that she can lift women’s boxing to new levels with her manager outlining some of the barriers that Bray’s golden girl had broken in Cardiff.
‘She is now the first Irish boxer ever to win an amateur and professional world title, so there are boundaries broken there. It is the first women’s world title, from one of the four major federations, to be fought for in the UK. And it was in front of 55,000 people on a massive show,’ Peters pointed out.
Even though she controlled the bout — she lost one round in ten, the first round she has lost in seven professional fights — Taylor wasn’t particularly happy with her own performance. She allowed the experienced Sanchez to drag her into a war that involved some of the dark arts of the trade.
‘I guess it can be hard not to be dragged into a war like that but I have to try and not let myself be drawn into it,’ explained Taylor, whose face was showing the marks of a proper battle, with her left eye purple and slightly swollen and two stitches above her right eye from a clash of heads.
‘I just need to stay a bit more composed and concentrate on boxing more. I just got caught up in it. It made for an exciting fight, but it was probably a bit too exciting. But that is part of the learning curve’
As everyone in Taylor’s camp was keen to emphasise, this was only her seventh pro bout. She has only been part of the paid ranks for 11 months. It has all been fast-tracked. Necessarily. Now, with one of the four belts she hopes to win around her waist, she can slow the pace a little.
And Saturday must have given her a real sense of satisfaction after her annus horribilis of 2016. Although she insists that she never doubted herself, many within the Irish public, who has just grown to expect Taylor to win, did.
‘I don’t think I ever doubted myself,’ she said, reflecting back on the defeats in the world championship and Olympics. ‘I always knew that people hadn’t seen the best of me, and I still believe that. It is sweet to come out with a great victory here. I guess you only appreciate the high points when you experience the low points. I had a tough year last year but I definitely knew I was going to come out on top.’
It takes two boxers to make a great fight and credit must go to Sanchez, the tough and durable former champion.
When she failed to make the weight on Friday afternoon, forfeiting her own title on the scales, it was generally assumed that she had just made the trip to pick up the pay-packet — which was four times bigger than anything she had ever earned before.
However, she more than held up her part of the bargain, ensuring that Taylor had to scrap to become world champion, recovering from the body-shot in the second-round to ask some questions of Taylor with a few right hands in the third and fourth.
There was a look of disgust on Taylor’s face when Sanchez failed at the scales at the weigh-in, though, and the WBA can be certain that the Bray native will take her responsibilities as champions an awful lot more seriously.
‘I was boxing for a world title, whether Sanchez made weight or not. But that was her responsibility to make weight. I don’t understand people losing a belt on the scales,’ Taylor said.
It didn’t reflect well on the sport that a champion could be as unprofessional as that, but Saturday might have heralded a brave new dawn.
A woman fought for a world title, third on the bill of a major stadium card, and stole the show when she insists she wasn’t even boxing at her best.
Claressa Shields, the American middleweight sensation who recently won the world title in her fourth pro bout, was one of the first to tweet her congratulations to Taylor.
Having criss-crossed the globe to obscure places like Tonsberg, Ningbo and Pazardzhik to collect her 18 major titles as an amateur, Taylor won her first world professional title on a stage deserving of her immense talent.
And with possible bouts against the likes of Holly Holm, Makaleka Mayer and Jessica McCaskill on the horizon, it is possible that when she finally gets her wish of a homecoming bout in Dublin, Ireland’s golden girl will be firmly established as the boxing world’s golden girl.
If she is not already.