Why a sequel to Saturday’s bedlam-inducing bout could take place for greater honours in the summer.
Gavan Casey AS 8,000 PEOPLE in Belfast’s SSE Arena began to remove their hands from their heads, many of them still trying to make sense of the bedlam that had ensued since Paddy Donovan had felled Lewis Crocker for the final time minutes earlier, Master of Ceremonies David Diamante delivered the final verdict from centre-ring.
Diamante’s misspeak was easily explainable in that, as well as officially scoring Crocker-Donovan, Foster had refereed Craig Richards’ stoppage victory over Padraig McCrory in the chief-support bout beforehand. Advertisement The problem for Donovan was that McDonnell had twice already deducted him points for head clashes with Crocker, which, as Donovan’s trainer Lee protested afterwards, was indeed a harsh read on the routine collisions caused by the boxers’ respective postures.
That sense of desperation surely contributed to the late shot which yielded both of those outcomes, with Crocker receiving oxygen on his stool but moving on to a mandatory shot at the IBF world title and Donovan crying into his trainer’s shoulder having snatched a first career defeat from the jaws of victory.
As soon as the clapper sounded to signal that there were 10 seconds remaining in the round, and particularly taking into account both crowd noise and fight state, the referee should have worked his way into a position from which he would have been able to stop the action immediately upon the bell. Whatever his reasoning, McDonnell was simply too far away from the boxers at that crucial moment.
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