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.
“Ladies and gentlemen, at the end of Round 8, referee Howard Foster disqualifies Paddy Donovan for a hit after the bell,” Diamante announced, “declaring your winner by disqualification — he’s still undefeated, from Belfast: Lewis ‘The Croc’ Crocker!”
Poor aul’ Howard Foster must have felt like taking a disqualifying swing at the dreadlocked MC: he hadn’t refereed the main event at all, instead judging it from a ringside vantage point where he had Donovan up 69-63 at the time of his disqualification.
It had been his fellow British official Marcus McDonnell who had disqualified Donovan, and whose performance would later be branded “a disgrace” by Donovan’s typically more mild-mannered trainer Andy Lee.
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.
And cruel as it may seem given his complete remove from Saturday’s controversy, Foster has become so synonymous with contentious finishes to fights over the years that a passive observer could be forgiven for thinking his full name is And Howard Foster Has Stopped It.
Indeed, while the overall pattern of Crocker-Donovan differed, the chaos, confusion and causticity of its endgame immediately took one back to Carl Froch’s initial victory over George Groves in 2013, wherein Foster misread an off-balance Groves as being hurt in the ninth round and caused outrage with his intervention.
Just as Groves did as the de facto ‘away’ fighter in Manchester almost 13 years ago, Donovan had built a sound lead over his domestic rival in Belfast only to feel afterwards as though referee Marcus McDonnell had pilfered his dream on a whim.
It is important to stress that Donovan’s final right hand on Crocker was late and fully illegal. It is equally important to note that this offence alone would not typically be grounds for disqualification.
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.
Donovan hadn’t helped his case along the way, either, by catching Crocker with a seemingly deliberate right elbow which, while it eluded McDonnell’s line of sight, caused Crocker to wince and complain to the point that the referee surely banked it as ‘something illegal’.
That unsportsmanlike shot surely accelerated the rate with which Crocker’s left eye became swollen shut, and it certainly contributed to the home boxer’s sense of injustice on the night as he began to recoil virtually every time the boxers’ heads came close in the lead-up to an exchange.
Crocker, a demonstrably tough man, will never acknowledge it out loud — indeed, he may never even admit it to himself — but he would have realised on some instinctive level after the sixth round that the only way he could preserve the ’0′ on his record on that given night would be for Donovan to foul out.
By the same token, after Donovan received his second points deduction for a head-clash in the eighth, he began to attack with a demonic energy: he knew he had to get Crocker out of there sooner than McDonnell could find a way to throw him out.
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.
While Andy Lee stressed afterwards that he couldn’t hear the bell from Donovan’s corner such was the level of noise engendered by the boxers’ last swipes at each other, the speed with which Donovan turned away from the final knockdown would suggest he was at least vaguely aware of it.
The likely reality is that ‘The Real Deal’ gave in to the temptation to fire off a finishing blow while the bell sounded — a legal shot — only for the bell to have stopped ringing by the time that message had reached his right arm from his brain.
Game over, and it was a mistake that Donovan was frankly naive in making having already gotten on the wrong side of referee McDonnell. However, it was also a mistake that McDonnell should have done a better job of preventing, at least for Crocker’s sake.
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.
Perhaps he hadn’t been able to distinguish the clapper from the general cacophony towards the end of the round. But between his one-eyed interpretation of the head clashes and his positioning in the final seconds, it was a bad night for the Englishman in the middle.
The Irishmen to either side of him, then, will surely run it back in the near future.
Their world-title eliminator was christened ‘A Point of Pride’ by promoters Matchroom and a sequel would become one even more so for Crocker, who realistically lost some street cred in what was technically a victory.
On paper, though, the Belfast man is currently top of the queue to challenge for the IBF welterweight world title and his trainer Billy Nelson has insisted that he will do so before he entertains the idea of a rematch with Donovan.
Donovan’s team have other ideas and are in the process of appealing to the IBF against their man’s DQ defeat. And while that appeal probably won’t see the result overturned — Donovan did, after all, clock Crocker after the bell — it will hardly fall on deaf ears, either.
The IBF are among the most reasonable of the four major sanctioning bodies, all of whom effectively make things up as they go along. A distinctly possible outcome from all of this is that Crocker will be positioned as the number one contender in their rankings and Donovan, whose star rose exponentially even in a loss on his record, will be bumped up to number two.
Should current IBF welterweight champion, Jaron ‘Boots’ Ennis, then beat Eimantas Stanionis in April and move up to light-middleweight as expected, a Crocker-Donovan rematch could theoretically take place for the vacant world title in the summer. (The IBF would first have to relax their rule which precludes a boxer from fighting for world honours off the back of a defeat but, again, they can do what they want: it’s their rule).
Incidentally, when Carl Froch and George Groves settled their differences in a 2014 rematch, the IBF’s supervisor for the bout was Daryl Peoples, its current president and the very man with whom Donovan’s team have been in contact about an appeal.
Eddie Hearn took Froch-Groves II from the indoor MEN Arena in Manchester to London’s Wembley Stadium, where Froch definitively knocked out Groves in front of 80,000 people.
Controversy sells and while Crocker and Donovan aren’t yet far enough down the line in their respective careers to pack out a stadium, an all-Irish world-title rematch between them would make a bona fide star of its winner.
Typical LFC supporter response get over it.
Could be the beginning of the end for Gary, once the press start picking holes in ya then usually the pressure cranks right up from all angles, we all miss him on sky anyway even liverpool fans too
Most Liverpool fans think he was great on sky hopefully we’ll see him back in August
Typical manc. Full of s#@t
Adrian I think your going to be late for school
You know he said he didn’t think management was in his future after taking the job
Perro y pato….take a bow whoever came up with that one
Hilarious. Side splittingly hilarious.