A HALF SHRUG of the shoulders from Katie Taylor about summed up a routine defence of her undisputed lightweight title against a tricky but offensively limited customer in Jennifer Han.
Taylor was completely dominant without looking anywhere near her blistering best. She won a shutout unanimous-decision victory but was still a touch dissatisfied with her work — which tells us plenty about how she has come to be the legendary athlete that she is.
Asked how she’d sum up her 10 rounds, she laughs. “Good question!” And then she runs through it all again in her head, just as you know she’s done at least a couple of times since the final bell at Headingley Stadium, Leeds on Saturday night.
“Yeah, I can’t be too disappointed, I guess,” she says. “It was 100-89 across the board, a dominant victory. I don’t think there were many fireworks throughout the fight but a win is a win.
“She was awkward; quite crafty and slippery. We knew that coming into the fight, as well. We knew she had a good jab, we knew she was good on her feet. I definitely would have liked to have gotten a stoppage but it takes two to tango at the end of the day and she was very good at surviving.
“I definitely tried to push the pace in the last few rounds. We knew it was a shutout victory and we weren’t trying to force it but it was very hard to catch her clean. She was good at holding, good inside. What can you do?
“It’s usually the case that you raise your game when you step into the ring against these big opponents. You do what you have to do against these kinds of opponents. It was a solid performance but it wasn’t masterful.”
It was unquestionably a bout in which two-minute rounds inhibited the aggressor and aided the survivor, particularly late on as Taylor attacked with real venom and Han seemed on the brink of unravelling. But you have to play the conditions.
Taylor also sees the benefit of two-minute rounds in that it forces women to fight at a fast pace, which is conducive to generating the type of excitement for which she has become famous in the pro ranks. She adds, though, with a smile, that “in this particular fight, three-minute rounds would have suited me better I think.”
If the fight itself — at least in its first half — felt a bit flat, the reception for Taylor at Headingley was anything but. The noise which greeted her invite to the ring by David Diamante was quite stirring after 18 months in which it became an impossibility. The sound which greeted her introduction in the ring was louder still, while Texan Han was roundly booed simply by dint of not being Taylor.
It’s difficult to know the extent to which the thousands of fans were aware of Taylor’s familial connection to the city or her Leeds United fandom, but it was certainly something she championed at every turn during fight week (although she felt that to wear a Leeds jersey to the ring would be a bit “cheesy”).
The choruses of ‘Stand Up If You Hate Man U’ during her fight might have happened in any case but equally, these days, Taylor would likely receive a spine-tingling reception in any British venue; she was, after all, moved to tears by the adulation of the crowd at Manchester Arena following her victory over Christina Linardatou in November 2019, her last bout in front of spectators.
“It was incredible,” she says of her welcome to Headingley. “The atmosphere was insane.
This is the first time I’ve fought in front of a crowd in a long time so I was getting goosebumps even listening to the crowd, walking out. It definitely made it very, very special. I’ve been saying all week that this city holds a special place in my heart and I think the whole city got behind me.
“The last time I was actually in Leeds was probably when I was a child,” she adds. “This is my first time being in here in probably 20 years. So it was amazing to come back here, see the city again and be around the Leeds people again. They’re definitely my kind of people.
I definitely feel the support over here (in the UK generally) has been incredible. They have kind of taken me in as their own over the last two years which is fantastic. But I have been saying all week that my dad is from Leeds so I hope they did know that as well! I was trying to keep it on the down-low that Roy Keane was my favourite player, all right…
While promoter Eddie Hearn has made it clear that his priority for Taylor is a career-defining bout with Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden next spring, she will likely first return to the ring this December. (“Is that right?” Taylor asks with a chuckle when Hearn’s plan is put to her. “That suits me, yeah!”)
Another mandatory challenger might have been in the pipeline originally but it’s likely, now, that Hearn and manager Brian Peters will seek for Taylor a greater challenge; based on Saturday night’s fare, she could probably do with the fear of losing to rediscover something resembling her recent best.
As always, the lightweight champion is open to fighting anybody, but there are a few names which especially tickle her fancy.
“I know Chantelle Cameron has that tournament going on at the moment,” Taylor says, referring to Matchroom’s ‘Road to Undisputed’ light-welterweight bracket; she will hope to face the eventual winner in an undisputed-versus-undisputed showdown.
“Amanda Serrano wants to become undisputed featherweight champion so that fight is off [for December].
“Estelle Mossely (Rio 2016 gold medal winner in Taylor’s division) would be a fantastic fight. She’s obviously a brilliant fighter. She has the IBO belt — I don’t really hear too much about that belt…” Taylor laughs, knowing that the less said about yet another alphabet title, the better.
“Obviously, Jessica McCaskill was here tonight,” she adds. “At least I think she was here, was she? I’d love that fight.”
Indeed, undisputed welterweight champion McCaskill and trainer-manager Rick Ramos traveled from Chicago to Leeds purely to make it known how keen they are to face Taylor in a rematch, four years on from the pair’s original bout at York Hall, London.
McCaskill, who emerged from that defeat with ample credit, has since gone on to win multiple world titles at light-welterweight and welterweight, twice beating boxing’s ‘First Lady’ and former pound-for-pound queen Cecilia Braekhus to rule over the latter division.
An all-undisputed re-run between them would likely take place well below the welterweight limit, somewhere between 142 and 144 pounds.
McCaskill also did some work for broadcasters DAZN as soon as they discovered she was bound for Leeds, although Taylor was scarcely impressed by the lengths to which the Windy City woman had gone in pursuit of a potential sequel: “I think it’s a bit silly, to be honest. I think she paid her own way to get here, as well, so…”
Manager Brian Peters interjects to say MMA star Cris Cyborg has also been back in touch about a prospective crossover bout — in a boxing ring, mind — between her and Taylor.
When it’s put to her that she has become almost a female ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, in that a fight against her is the most lucrative option available to any fighter in her sport, Taylor half-commits to an impression of Canelo’s ‘Pay Day’ song, laughing her way through a very brief effort.
“When I turned pro five years ago, we didn’t really know how this was going to go. It’s been amazing to see the development of women’s boxing over the last few years. I feel like all the big names are calling me out.
I don’t think any of the big names can actually fight without mentioning my name. That’s a great position to be in, though, for sure.
After a hard night’s work against Natasha Jonas in April and a messy if one-sided victory over Han, the sharks in Taylor’s periphery will undoubtedly smell blood.
They’ll call her out now more loudly than they ever have and who knows, Amanda Serrano might actually even fight her.
The future — and more pertinently, an exit plan in the not-too-distant future — will need to be carefully cartographed by her team. And best of luck to them, because Taylor simply doesn’t think in these terms.
She believes she has it within her to clean house: “I would like at the end of my career to be a multiple-weight undisputed champion. 140 pounds, 147 pounds.”
154 pounds, she laughs, “might be pushing it”.
To claim all the belts at light-welterweight and welterweight sounds like an extra career’s worth of hassle on the face of it but with the lay of the land in women’s boxing, it should take only two fights: one versus McCaskill, one versus Cameron or whoever emerges victorious from the 140-pound tournament.
“It’s very, very doable, I think,” Taylor says.
