BRAVE SELBY SHINES
Declan Taylor sees Lee defend his IBF featherweight title in the face of shocking news
FEW sports can compete with boxing when it comes to bravery and Lee Selby delivered another shining example of exactly why on Saturday night. The IBF featherweight king was less than a week out from this mandatory defence against former world champion Jonathan Barros when he received a numbing phone call from back home in Wales. The news was desperate. Selby’s mother Frankie had died and his family were urging him to pull out of his fight and join them back in Barry.
But the 30-year-old decided instead to box on in her memory and she would have been proud of his performance against the experienced Argentinean.
“I had my family back home crying on the phone to me in the early hours of the morning,” Selby said afterwards. “They were telling me the bad news at 3 o’clock in the morning, I’m up all night crying on the phone to my family.
“They said pull out, you can’t fight you have got to come home, but I just turned my phone off, locked down all my social media and told my team not to mention anything to me and just blanked it out, stayed professional.”
Given the circumstances, his performance was nothing short of exceptional.
The Welshman seemed to tower over his opponent and boxed brilliantly behind the jab early on. He was attempting to work off it with left hooks to head and body but Barros, the experienced campaigner, was tucking up well to evade.
These two were originally meant to meet in January on the undercard of Carl Frampton-leo Santa Cruz II in Las Vegas, but complications around Barros’ prefight blood test resulted in a cancellation.
It meant Selby had boxed only once since April 2016, and he admitted during the build-up here in London that his career has stalled over the past 12 months.
But there were few signs of ring rust as he began to pull away on the cards. He did not, however, have it all his own way as a clash of heads opened up a nasty cut over his right eye in the fifth round.
It never threatened to slow him down, though, and he began to dazzle off the back foot with his usual silky skills while also attempting to mix it up at short range with his bent-arm shots. And it was the shortest of left hooks which eventually downed Barros reasonably heavily in the final round, although he clambered to his feet in time to answer Steve Gray’s count.
The knockdown only added gloss to the scoreline with two scores of 117110 alongside 119-108 handing him a comfortable victory.
One man who was also heading for a points victory was Robbie Davies Jnr but, while he was leading on all three cards, he was stopped in the 12th round by buzzsaw Pole Michal Syrowatka. The Liverpudlian super-lightweight had struggled to get to grips with the man from Elk throughout the contest but was still heading for a victory, helped somewhat by a fortuitous ninth-round knockdown which looked more like a trip.
But the win slipped away in the 12th when one of Syrowatka’s many attempted left hooks crashed through Davies’ guard, sending him to the deck. He rose on unsteady legs and Gray allowed it to continue until another barrage from the visitor forced a stoppage 1-09 into the session.
Judges were required to separate Brentwood’s defending British superfeatherweight champion Martin J Ward and Belfast’s Anthony Cacace, with the vacant Commonwealth title also on the line. The challenger looked to be more dangerous, and certainly landed the more eye-catching shots, but Ward was always the busier of the two.
Cacace was only working in bursts but he was causing Ward trouble from both stances, although his friend Carl Frampton, at ringside, regularly pleaded with him to stay orthodox.
At the final bell, both men celebrated as if they had won but it was the champion who scored a unanimous decision meaning he has now won the Lonsdale belt outright. Michael Alexander had it 115-114, Gray 116-114 and Marcus Mcdonnell 116-113.
There was also an eye-catching victory for Kid Galahad, who stopped former Scott Quigg victim Jose Cayetano in the 10th round to pick up the vacant IBF Inter-continental featherweight trinket.
Quigg took nine to despatch the tough Mexican last year but Galahad did the business after 2-14 of the 10th when Mcdonnell decided Cayetano could take no more.
Earlier, Chris Eubank Senior’s other son Nathanael Wilson finished Birmingham-based Yaddollah Ghasemi after 1-48 of the second (of four) when Chas Coakley stepped in.
Kieran Mccann handed Banbury cruiserweight Joe Jackson Brown a 40-36 victory over Derby’s Elvis Dube while Portsmouth light-heavyweight Joel
Mcintyre saw off Lithuanian Remigijus Ziausys by the same score. Mccann also awarded German middleweight Patrick Wojcicki a 60-54 win after a promising six-round display against Lancashireman Darryl Sharp.
Finally, after the main event, Bermondsey welterweight prospect Chris
Kongo was given a 40-36 win by Coakley against popular journeyman William
Warburton, of Atherton, in what was his 150th pro bout.