IT’S DIFFICULT TO definitively decipher even from the broadcast footage but as it played out live, directly in front of the press seats, Lewis Crocker’s first knockdown of Paddy Donovan at Windsor Park just looked a bit ‘wrong’.
That Crocker’s reaction to such a potential hinge point in their rivalry was so half-assed told part of the story. Donovan’s mild protestation to referee Howard Foster, a shake of his head, and a glance of disbelief towards his corner filled in the blanks.
Obvious from the media-seat vantage point was that an entanglement of the boxers’ legs had contributed to Donovan’s fall. There may have been a partial slip of Donovan’s right foot, too, as it strayed outside Crocker’s left a split second before the muddle — that portion of canvas certainly would have been damp given the angle of an earlier rain shower.
Undeniable, though, was that Crocker touched Donovan behind the ear with a left hand deflected via his shoulder, which helped the Limerick man to the canvas. By the letter of the law, Howard Foster’s decision to administer a 10-count was just. And it was only fair, then, for the three judges to score the bout 10-8 in Crocker’s favour: Donovan won most of the round otherwise, but not by enough to demand that the numbers were fudged.
Lewis Crocker's first knockdown of Paddy Donovan. Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson
Irrespective of the lens through which you viewed it, it was a pivotal stroke of fortune for ‘The Croc’. And it was ultimately the margin by which Donovan lost last Saturday’s first ever all-Irish world-title fight.
The two judges who scored the bout in Crocker’s favour did so with tallies of 114-113 and 114-112 for the Belfast man, while a third leaned 115-111 in the direction of Donovan, yielding a split-decision verdict. To pare back the boxing terminology, Lewis Crocker won the fight by a single round.
Had Paddy Donovan not tripped, slipped, or been clipped on his way to the canvas in Round 3, he would have won the bout — most likely on all three judges’ scorecards — and taken the IBF welterweight world title back to Limerick.
A knotting of legs. A drop of rain. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere. On such margins do careers swing, not to mind close fights.
Paddy Donovan has fought 20 rounds against Lewis Crocker and won most of them. He’s now in boxing purgatory, even if this writer and many more adjudged him the narrow winner of last Saturday’s bout.
It must be said that it was Crocker who produced the shot for which the fight will ultimately be remembered. The Other Knockdown — the one in Round 5 — was in isolation almost worthy of writing Crocker into Irish boxing lore.
Consider the grief he was force-fed for the six months after Donovan broadly outclassed him at the SSE Arena only to get disqualified with Crocker at his mercy. The Belfast man coded it all into this particular left hand and detonated the shot that he had been afraid to let fly in March. He dropped a bomb on his rival the likes of which Donovan had never absorbed before, likely in any context.
That Donovan rose at the count of two instead of taking the eight-count to regather his senses can be construed as a positive in a broader context: his lack of survival instinct suggests the Limerick man is unacquainted with the canvas even in sparring. But Donovan was fortunate that insufficient time remained in the round for Crocker to do to him what he should have done to Crocker six months earlier.
Lewis Crocker drops Paddy Donovan hard during the fifth round. Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson
Donovan’s recovery within the next 60 seconds was remarkable for a boxer who would have been blinking away glimpses of the shadow realm as he retreated to his corner. For him to resume control of the bout upon its resumption in Round 6 proved his conditioning to be phenomenal.
There was an earth-shattering quality to Crocker’s fifth-round knockdown, though. It warped the rhythm of the fight. Donovan had discovered the price for over-committing to an attack. And with two trips to the canvas already on his ledger, he knew that to make the same mistake again would most likely end his world-title dream, not necessarily by knockout, but on the cards, where it would be virtually impossible to win with three 10-8s against him.
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Andy Lee’s man consequently boxed more cautiously until Round 11, when he again took more risks in an effort to definitively separate himself from his fellow challenger. That late burst proved fruitless.
Donovan lands a left hand on Crocker. Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson
Crocker — as well as his under-fire trainer, Billy Nelson, who drew up the shot — deserves credit for influencing the pattern of the fight with that nuclear second knockdown. That being said, The Croc should have received that credit on the scorecards only in the fifth round, not beyond it. One wonders if judges Pawel Kardyni (Poland) and Matteo Montella (Italy) bought too firmly into the concept of Crocker winning ‘the story of the fight’ as opposed to winning the actual fight.
For what it’s worth, this writer saw it the same way as Welsh judge Reece Carter: 115-111 to Donovan, which amounts to a nine-rounds-to-three victory for the Limerick man with extra points deducted for the knockdowns.
Judges Kardyni and Montella found reason to score three further rounds to Crocker than Carter deemed him worthy.
Time to pour some cold water on accusations of ‘home cooking’, though: Matchroom Boxing promote both Crocker and Donovan and, in terms of their respective levels of marketability, Eddie Hearn and co. would have had no preferred outcome in Belfast. There can’t even really exist an argument that Kardyni and Montella were swayed by a partisan home crowd, because Windsor Park was effectively a split house by the time the first bell chimed.
Matchroom also knew of Donovan’s selling power in advance of the rematch: several areas of the ground were segregated based on the location from which tickets were purchased. It makes no sense for anyone to have deliberately screwed him. Two judges simply saw a few close rounds differently to the majority of viewers. Them’s the breaks.
Let this not be read as a cry for help — but Matchroom actually knocked it out of the park with this rematch. After a messy night in the stands at the SSE Arena back in March, the promoters spent somewhere in the region of €140,000 on security, a cost roughly akin to the equivalent for a Katie Taylor fight at Croke Park.
It worked, as did Donovan’s calls for both sets of supporters to “keep it country” and allow the children present to enjoy a night of boxing without having to duck for cover. There was no crowd trouble to speak of last Saturday. The atmosphere inside Windsor was instead festive, familial, and fun.
Mind you, the atmosphere on the way into the ground initially suggested that Donovan might need Alan McLoughlin to pop up with an 11th-round volley to snatch a draw.
Whereas Union Jacks, Northern Irish football flags and Lewis Crocker bunting adorned the concourse, the tricolour was deemed inflammatory to the point that it was being confiscated in all forms by security bag-checkers. As one young lad handed over his green, white and orange bucket hat, he lamented “the worst 10 pound I’ve ever spent” to his TikTok followers.
Windsor Park on fight day. Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson
The irony is that Crocker himself, while he hails from a Unionist background, self-identifies as a Northern Irishman, an Irishman, a Brit, or whatever you’re having yourself. The Sandy Row native once told The 42 that he’s proud to have boxed beneath the tricolour as an amateur. Like many people born in the north in the mid-to-late ’90s, a hearty dislike for one of the two giants of Scottish football is about as serious as Crocker gets about identity politics.
His dream bout at Windsor Park, where he has supported his local club, Linfield, since he was a boy, was broadly antithetical to 1993′s all-Irish World Cup qualifier at the old ground, and more representative of a new north as Crocker experiences it. That one Belfast man bounced into the ground bellowing “PADDY DONOVAN’S GREEN AND WHITE ARMY”, and earned only laughs, was proof enough of that.
As the final verdict was announced by MC David Diamante, all sides of Windsor Park went wild. The Crocker fans jumped for joy. The boos of the huge Donovan contingent created a cacophony.
Both emotional extremes were justifiable. The impartial among us experienced that internal swirl of contrasting feelings battling for dominance.
To deal in fact rather than sentiment, Lewis Crocker will spend the rest of his life admiring a world-title belt above his mantlepiece. And he’ll now have the means to buy the very house in which he can show off his proudest achievement.
His mission, now, will be to make hay for as long as the sun continues to shine.
Crocker has ascended to the big leagues. He this week attended the launch press conference for Chris Eubank’s rematch with Conor Benn, the latter of whom could well wind up challenging Crocker for his title should he move back down to welterweight when he finally buries the hatchet in one of boxing’s most stupid rivalries.
The purse for a Crocker-Benn fight would blow last Saturday’s paycheque out of the water. So too would a bout with any of America’s recognisable welterweight contenders such as Ryan Garcia or Teofimo Lopez. That’s second-house money or, as is more likely in Crocker’s case, an opportunity to move his parents up in the world.
The potential riches will only compound should Crocker manage to shock one of those bigger names.
Lewis Crocker takes a moment with the IBF world-title belt in his dressing room. Matthew Pover
Matthew Pover
Many in Irish boxing will protest his split-decision win against Donovan but exceptionally few of them will begrudge Crocker such life-changing opportunities. Sound as a pound, humble to a fault, and weirdly charismatic for someone who has swerved the spotlight at every turn, Crocker has always been a model ambassador for the sport on this island.
And yet few will disagree with Paddy Donovan, no less a fine representative of Irish boxing, who doubtless believes the sun should be shining above Limerick.
‘The Real Deal’ was magnanimous in his Instagram post earlier this week, congratulating Crocker and simply acknowledging that the decision “didn’t go my way”.
He deserves another rematch, certainly, but it won’t happen immediately. There simply won’t be a wider market demand for Crocker-Donovan 3 so soon after Crocker-Donovan 2, which frankly stunk as an entertainment spectacle.
A trilogy bout would be a loss-maker for Matchroom in the short term but it will soon gain traction once more provided Crocker can win his first defence and Donovan can bounce back from a second successive devastating night in Belfast.
A devastated Donovan in his dressing-room. Paddy Donovan / Team Donovan
Paddy Donovan / Team Donovan / Team Donovan
For Donovan, the road back towards the top is a game of landmine hopscotch. Cruelly, he’s a win or two away from re-entering world-title contention but equally only a defeat away from irrelevance. The kicker is that these next steps in his journey, while perilous, will make for a tougher sell to the boxer himself than his two fights with Crocker, for which the rewards were tangible.
Donovan’s trainer and confidante, Andy Lee, could scarcely be better qualified to steer him through this mire having personally suffered a couple of high-profile career setbacks before he eventually fulfilled Emanuel Steward’s prophecy and became a world champion in 2014.
It’s important that Donovan decompresses with his family and, should he so choose, that he heads for a local pint to soak in the sympathies of those who will feel even more aggrieved about the judges’ scorecards than he does.
And while his newborn son at home may dictate that Donovan is unable to join Lee and Joe Parker for training camp ahead of the Kiwi’s heavyweight bout with Fabio Wadley on 25 October, Lee and his band of brothers at Ballybrack Boxing Club will lure Donovan back to the gym when they feel the time for sulking is over — if indeed their star welterweight still needs encouragement at all.
Their message to Paddy Donovan will be simple: your time will come.
And it probably will. But it might not. That’s boxing.
Lewis Crocker’s time has arrived. It required a stroke of fortune and it warranted a double-check of the watch. But that’s boxing too.
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Crocker, Donovan, and the tiny margins between lifelong dreams and landmine hopscotch
IT’S DIFFICULT TO definitively decipher even from the broadcast footage but as it played out live, directly in front of the press seats, Lewis Crocker’s first knockdown of Paddy Donovan at Windsor Park just looked a bit ‘wrong’.
That Crocker’s reaction to such a potential hinge point in their rivalry was so half-assed told part of the story. Donovan’s mild protestation to referee Howard Foster, a shake of his head, and a glance of disbelief towards his corner filled in the blanks.
Obvious from the media-seat vantage point was that an entanglement of the boxers’ legs had contributed to Donovan’s fall. There may have been a partial slip of Donovan’s right foot, too, as it strayed outside Crocker’s left a split second before the muddle — that portion of canvas certainly would have been damp given the angle of an earlier rain shower.
Undeniable, though, was that Crocker touched Donovan behind the ear with a left hand deflected via his shoulder, which helped the Limerick man to the canvas. By the letter of the law, Howard Foster’s decision to administer a 10-count was just. And it was only fair, then, for the three judges to score the bout 10-8 in Crocker’s favour: Donovan won most of the round otherwise, but not by enough to demand that the numbers were fudged.
Irrespective of the lens through which you viewed it, it was a pivotal stroke of fortune for ‘The Croc’. And it was ultimately the margin by which Donovan lost last Saturday’s first ever all-Irish world-title fight.
The two judges who scored the bout in Crocker’s favour did so with tallies of 114-113 and 114-112 for the Belfast man, while a third leaned 115-111 in the direction of Donovan, yielding a split-decision verdict. To pare back the boxing terminology, Lewis Crocker won the fight by a single round.
Had Paddy Donovan not tripped, slipped, or been clipped on his way to the canvas in Round 3, he would have won the bout — most likely on all three judges’ scorecards — and taken the IBF welterweight world title back to Limerick.
A knotting of legs. A drop of rain. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere. On such margins do careers swing, not to mind close fights.
Paddy Donovan has fought 20 rounds against Lewis Crocker and won most of them. He’s now in boxing purgatory, even if this writer and many more adjudged him the narrow winner of last Saturday’s bout.
It must be said that it was Crocker who produced the shot for which the fight will ultimately be remembered. The Other Knockdown — the one in Round 5 — was in isolation almost worthy of writing Crocker into Irish boxing lore.
Consider the grief he was force-fed for the six months after Donovan broadly outclassed him at the SSE Arena only to get disqualified with Crocker at his mercy. The Belfast man coded it all into this particular left hand and detonated the shot that he had been afraid to let fly in March. He dropped a bomb on his rival the likes of which Donovan had never absorbed before, likely in any context.
That Donovan rose at the count of two instead of taking the eight-count to regather his senses can be construed as a positive in a broader context: his lack of survival instinct suggests the Limerick man is unacquainted with the canvas even in sparring. But Donovan was fortunate that insufficient time remained in the round for Crocker to do to him what he should have done to Crocker six months earlier.
Donovan’s recovery within the next 60 seconds was remarkable for a boxer who would have been blinking away glimpses of the shadow realm as he retreated to his corner. For him to resume control of the bout upon its resumption in Round 6 proved his conditioning to be phenomenal.
There was an earth-shattering quality to Crocker’s fifth-round knockdown, though. It warped the rhythm of the fight. Donovan had discovered the price for over-committing to an attack. And with two trips to the canvas already on his ledger, he knew that to make the same mistake again would most likely end his world-title dream, not necessarily by knockout, but on the cards, where it would be virtually impossible to win with three 10-8s against him.
Andy Lee’s man consequently boxed more cautiously until Round 11, when he again took more risks in an effort to definitively separate himself from his fellow challenger. That late burst proved fruitless.
Crocker — as well as his under-fire trainer, Billy Nelson, who drew up the shot — deserves credit for influencing the pattern of the fight with that nuclear second knockdown. That being said, The Croc should have received that credit on the scorecards only in the fifth round, not beyond it. One wonders if judges Pawel Kardyni (Poland) and Matteo Montella (Italy) bought too firmly into the concept of Crocker winning ‘the story of the fight’ as opposed to winning the actual fight.
For what it’s worth, this writer saw it the same way as Welsh judge Reece Carter: 115-111 to Donovan, which amounts to a nine-rounds-to-three victory for the Limerick man with extra points deducted for the knockdowns.
Judges Kardyni and Montella found reason to score three further rounds to Crocker than Carter deemed him worthy.
Time to pour some cold water on accusations of ‘home cooking’, though: Matchroom Boxing promote both Crocker and Donovan and, in terms of their respective levels of marketability, Eddie Hearn and co. would have had no preferred outcome in Belfast. There can’t even really exist an argument that Kardyni and Montella were swayed by a partisan home crowd, because Windsor Park was effectively a split house by the time the first bell chimed.
Matchroom also knew of Donovan’s selling power in advance of the rematch: several areas of the ground were segregated based on the location from which tickets were purchased. It makes no sense for anyone to have deliberately screwed him. Two judges simply saw a few close rounds differently to the majority of viewers. Them’s the breaks.
Let this not be read as a cry for help — but Matchroom actually knocked it out of the park with this rematch. After a messy night in the stands at the SSE Arena back in March, the promoters spent somewhere in the region of €140,000 on security, a cost roughly akin to the equivalent for a Katie Taylor fight at Croke Park.
It worked, as did Donovan’s calls for both sets of supporters to “keep it country” and allow the children present to enjoy a night of boxing without having to duck for cover. There was no crowd trouble to speak of last Saturday. The atmosphere inside Windsor was instead festive, familial, and fun.
Mind you, the atmosphere on the way into the ground initially suggested that Donovan might need Alan McLoughlin to pop up with an 11th-round volley to snatch a draw.
Whereas Union Jacks, Northern Irish football flags and Lewis Crocker bunting adorned the concourse, the tricolour was deemed inflammatory to the point that it was being confiscated in all forms by security bag-checkers. As one young lad handed over his green, white and orange bucket hat, he lamented “the worst 10 pound I’ve ever spent” to his TikTok followers.
The irony is that Crocker himself, while he hails from a Unionist background, self-identifies as a Northern Irishman, an Irishman, a Brit, or whatever you’re having yourself. The Sandy Row native once told The 42 that he’s proud to have boxed beneath the tricolour as an amateur. Like many people born in the north in the mid-to-late ’90s, a hearty dislike for one of the two giants of Scottish football is about as serious as Crocker gets about identity politics.
His dream bout at Windsor Park, where he has supported his local club, Linfield, since he was a boy, was broadly antithetical to 1993′s all-Irish World Cup qualifier at the old ground, and more representative of a new north as Crocker experiences it. That one Belfast man bounced into the ground bellowing “PADDY DONOVAN’S GREEN AND WHITE ARMY”, and earned only laughs, was proof enough of that.
As the final verdict was announced by MC David Diamante, all sides of Windsor Park went wild. The Crocker fans jumped for joy. The boos of the huge Donovan contingent created a cacophony.
Both emotional extremes were justifiable. The impartial among us experienced that internal swirl of contrasting feelings battling for dominance.
To deal in fact rather than sentiment, Lewis Crocker will spend the rest of his life admiring a world-title belt above his mantlepiece. And he’ll now have the means to buy the very house in which he can show off his proudest achievement.
His mission, now, will be to make hay for as long as the sun continues to shine.
Crocker has ascended to the big leagues. He this week attended the launch press conference for Chris Eubank’s rematch with Conor Benn, the latter of whom could well wind up challenging Crocker for his title should he move back down to welterweight when he finally buries the hatchet in one of boxing’s most stupid rivalries.
The purse for a Crocker-Benn fight would blow last Saturday’s paycheque out of the water. So too would a bout with any of America’s recognisable welterweight contenders such as Ryan Garcia or Teofimo Lopez. That’s second-house money or, as is more likely in Crocker’s case, an opportunity to move his parents up in the world.
The potential riches will only compound should Crocker manage to shock one of those bigger names.
Many in Irish boxing will protest his split-decision win against Donovan but exceptionally few of them will begrudge Crocker such life-changing opportunities. Sound as a pound, humble to a fault, and weirdly charismatic for someone who has swerved the spotlight at every turn, Crocker has always been a model ambassador for the sport on this island.
And yet few will disagree with Paddy Donovan, no less a fine representative of Irish boxing, who doubtless believes the sun should be shining above Limerick.
‘The Real Deal’ was magnanimous in his Instagram post earlier this week, congratulating Crocker and simply acknowledging that the decision “didn’t go my way”.
He deserves another rematch, certainly, but it won’t happen immediately. There simply won’t be a wider market demand for Crocker-Donovan 3 so soon after Crocker-Donovan 2, which frankly stunk as an entertainment spectacle.
A trilogy bout would be a loss-maker for Matchroom in the short term but it will soon gain traction once more provided Crocker can win his first defence and Donovan can bounce back from a second successive devastating night in Belfast.
For Donovan, the road back towards the top is a game of landmine hopscotch. Cruelly, he’s a win or two away from re-entering world-title contention but equally only a defeat away from irrelevance. The kicker is that these next steps in his journey, while perilous, will make for a tougher sell to the boxer himself than his two fights with Crocker, for which the rewards were tangible.
Donovan’s trainer and confidante, Andy Lee, could scarcely be better qualified to steer him through this mire having personally suffered a couple of high-profile career setbacks before he eventually fulfilled Emanuel Steward’s prophecy and became a world champion in 2014.
It’s important that Donovan decompresses with his family and, should he so choose, that he heads for a local pint to soak in the sympathies of those who will feel even more aggrieved about the judges’ scorecards than he does.
And while his newborn son at home may dictate that Donovan is unable to join Lee and Joe Parker for training camp ahead of the Kiwi’s heavyweight bout with Fabio Wadley on 25 October, Lee and his band of brothers at Ballybrack Boxing Club will lure Donovan back to the gym when they feel the time for sulking is over — if indeed their star welterweight still needs encouragement at all.
Their message to Paddy Donovan will be simple: your time will come.
And it probably will. But it might not. That’s boxing.
Lewis Crocker’s time has arrived. It required a stroke of fortune and it warranted a double-check of the watch. But that’s boxing too.
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Boxing Lewis Crocker Paddy Donovan that's boxing