SHE WILL BE forced to wait a while longer before finally facing her nemesis in the professional ranks, but undisputed lightweight champion Katie Taylor won’t be resting on her laurels as she — like the rest of us — waits for the coronavirus pandemic to punch itself out over the coming months.

Taylor’s women’s superfight against Amanda Serrano in Manchester was yesterday officially postponed with 4 July now tentatively pencilled in as its new landing spot in the calendar, public health and safety pending.

For the 33-year-old, though, it will be something resembling business as usual as she begins a period of working from home. Taylor recently purchased a home in Connecticut, downstairs in which she has installed a gym that would be the envy of most communities.

“I feel like my whole life has been in quarantine,” a laughing Taylor told her promoter, Eddie Hearn, in a conversation on Instagram Live.

I said to my family: ‘You realise you’ve already been in isolation so much when you have to go into quarantine and nothing about your personal life changes.’

“I’ve obviously been over here for a few months training for 2 May”, the Bray woman continued, “but this is just a time for me, now, to work on a few things.

This isn’t a time for anyone to take their foot off the gas. It’s going to pay off for the fighters who are disciplined right now. These are the times when it actually makes the difference, I feel. You can turn this into a positive and actually try to work on a few things. And when the boxing world does come back, I’m going to be one of the fighters who was disciplined and I’m going to be ready for whenever that fight date is.

Whenever it does take place, Taylor-Serrano will be the biggest — both financially and in terms of cultural significance — in the history of women’s boxing.

Puerto Rican New Yorker Serrano, a seven-weight world champion (albeit the majority of the world titles she has won have been vacant WBO titles), is both on paper and in the eyes of the bookmakers a career-biggest risk to Taylor’s unbeaten record — a fact made all the more alarming by the fact that many in the world of boxing believe Deline Persoon beat Taylor in New York last June.

“It is a dangerous fight for both of us, and career-changing for both of us,” Taylor said.

“Whoever wins this fight is cemented at number one in women’s boxing.

I go into every fight with the same mindset. Nothing has changed. She obviously does an awful lot of talking and it will be the same for this fight. But I don’t get involved in anything like that.

It is an approach forged in her faith; from a young age, one of Taylor’s favourite lines from the bible has been, ‘In quietness and trust is your strength’, from Isaiah 30:15.

And when she isn’t keeping her training ticking over downstairs or speaking to family and friends over the coming weeks, Taylor will both rely upon and attempt to nourish that faith in a bid to keep everything on an even keel. It might not work for everybody, but it will work for her.

“It’s obviously awful what’s happening with the coronavirus. The whole world is on lockdown right now.

But there’s a lot of good things that are happening as well. People’s lives have been forced to slow down. Maybe you’ve had to reconnect with your family again.

“And for me, this is a time to spend more time with God, I guess; read his word, read the bible. That’s mental health for me. I get great comfort from that. I’ve always said, from a very, very young age, that that’s where my confidence comes from, that’s where my strength comes from. And that’s why I don’t need to talk before these big fights.”