Key events
Liverpool’s Ball becomes Britain’s second current male world champion
A special mention for Britain’s newest world champion: Liverpool’s Nick Ball. The 27-year-old Merseysider won a razor-thin split decision over Raymond Ford to capture Ford’s WBA featherweight title in a wildly entertaining back-and-forth scrap that surely demands a rematch.
Two judges scored it 115-113 for Ford while the third had it by the same margin for his American foe.
“He’s a tough man and a class boxer. I had to dig deep to get the belt,” said Ball, a world champion in his second try after being cruelly denied in a controversial March draw with Mexico’s Rey Vargas.
“I’m made up. I should be two-time [champion] but it’s not the case. I’m the champ now so it doesn’t really matter,” Ball added.
The Liverpudlian becomes England’s second active male world champion, joining WBO cruiserweight title-holder Chris Billam-Smith.
“It’s how you recover and come back,” Ball said. “That’s a true champion and that’s what I am now.”
Preamble
Hello and welcome to Riyadh’s Kingdom Arena for our round-by-round coverage of Deontay Wilder-Zhilei Zhang and Daniel Dubois-Filip Hrgović, a couple of fascinating heavyweight matchups that will help shape both the short- and long-term future of boxing’s glamour division.
They are the final two fights on a stacked card billed as ‘5 vs 5: Matchroom vs Queensberry’, where leading British promoters Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren, once bitter rivals, are putting their respective stables on the line for bragging rights and a reported $3m payday in addition to the fighters’ individual (and undisclosed) purses.
Under the rules of the format, each boxer will earn one point for a decision victory or two for a knockout with no points awarded in the case of a draw. The team captains – that’s Wilder for Matchroom and Sheeraz for Queensberry – will see their individual points doubled. The team with the most points overall wins. A tiny score bug on the top-left corner of the telecast has been tracking the running score all night. (We’d venture to guess it’s pretty meaningless for all but the most hardcore of British fight fans, but a rare team concept arguably the most individual of sports is nothing if not a conversation starter.)
Right now Queensberry is dog-walking Matchroom by a 6-0 margin with the two feature attractions to go. Here’s are the fight-by-fight results so far:
• Willy Hutchinson UD 12 Craig Richards QB 1-0 MR (QB 1-0 MR)
• Nick Ball SD 12 Raymond Ford QB 1-0 MR (QB 2-0 MR)
• Hamzah Sheeraz TKO 11 Austin Williams QB 4-0 MR (QB 6-0 MR)
We’ve got one more fight to come that’s not part of the 5 vs 5 competition (more on that in a moment). Then it’s Dubois v Hrgović and Wilder v Zhang, in that order.
Bryan will be here shortly. In the meantime here’s the big, erm, boxing news of the past 24 hours.
