AS KATIE TAYLOR was getting up to leave the media roundtable in the bowels of Madison Square Garden yesterday, Matchroom’s head of US media, Anthony Leaver, gave the assembled Irish press a detailed breakdown of the ticket sales. The long and short of it was that over 4,000 people are due in from Ireland and the UK to attend the fight.

‘The new Ricky Hatton,’ I joked with Taylor, alluding to the Mancunian boxing icon’s travelling army of supporters during his own professional boxing heyday.

“Is that right, yeah?” Taylor said. “I just hope I don’t put on as much weight as him between fights!”

She had the room in stitches, and not for the first time on Thursday morning.

How she had found the patience for all of her media obligations this week, I’ll never know. But whereas in the past, I’ve seen Taylor grin and bear her way through press conference days and fight weeks generally, she seems to be operating on a different plane in advance of the biggest fight of her professional career. She’s almost eerily cool and apparently taking the build-up in her stride.

As she said yesterday, this week is a “piece of cake” compared to carrying the weight of a nation on her shoulders during the 2012 London Olympics. And as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, I doubt if Amanda Serrano has found it the same.

In truth, 20 minutes in Taylor’s company was enough to make me question my entire outlook on the fight, which has been pessimistic from an Irish point of view. What’s clear is that if Taylor does happen to suffer her first professional defeat tomorrow night, she will be more shocked than anybody.

Her trainer, the usually reserved Ross Enamait, was commensurately bullish at the top table afterwards…

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