Gavan Casey Reporting from Dallas

ROUND 5 AT Madison Square Garden in April 2022 was among the most extraordinary to ever grace the ring at New York’s most historic sports venue.

Amanda Serrano came out hot, clipping Taylor with a chopping overhand left but taking one back for her troubles.

But it was when the ‘Real Deal’ walked Taylor towards a neutral corner that all hell broke loose.

Serrano, whose high knockout percentage is an anomaly in female boxing, rasped shots towards Taylor’s top deck, bringing the Puerto Rican contingent to their feet on Penn Plaza.

Taylor initially dealt with this onslaught with her unparalleled expertise, riding the shots with solid head movement and pinging Serrano back off either hand.

The 65-70% Irish crowd joined the Puerto Ricans in leaving their seats. There were 30 seconds gone in the fifth and it felt like another 30 would stress the structural integrity of the arena.

Serrano moved south to Taylor’s body, pinning her to the ropes and lashing in hooks off either hand. It briefly threatened to overwhelm Taylor, who at one point tried to reply only to find her left arm caught in the ropes.

With the wind taken out of her sails, Taylor manoeuvred her way back towards centre-ring. She wasn’t given much chance to catch her breath, but she did catch Serrano with a peach of a left hook upstairs as the hometown fighter poured it on once more.

Taylor’s legs straightened — a bad sign — and Serrano took full advantage. She blitzed Taylor with left uppercuts, right hooks and eventually left hooks, bloodying Taylor’s nose and stiffening her to almost statuesque form.

Serrano moved in for the kill. Taylor clung on for dear life.

Body. Head. Head. Serrano blasted Taylor with everything in her arsenal. Taylor, without the strength to clinch, flicked back only tokenistic shots in an effort to slow Serrano’s momentum.

Like the crowd, she remained on her feet. Her ears would have been ringing louder than the bell when it sounded, but referee Michael Griffin put his arm between the combatants immediately. Taylor had survived and she walked to her corner at snail’s pace. Her race looked run.

Judge Guido Cavalleri scored the fifth round 10-8 in Serrano’s favour, a margin which is usually reserved for a knockdown.

Taylor produced something remarkable even in losing the following round on all three cards. She slowed Serrano’s momentum and conjured enough pop to find some success of her own. She went on to win the fight down the stretch.

“When you’re in shape and you’re fit, you recover so well from those moments,” Taylor said earlier this week.

“I take a lot of reassurance and confidence from that, because I took her biggest shots and I wasn’t stumbled, I wasn’t moved. And I won the second half of that fight, so I take a lot of reassurance going into the rematch, now, because of that.”

It’s not rocket science but the key to victory for Taylor in tonight’s rematch is to avoid what happened in that iconic fifth. It effectively cost her two rounds because of how careful she consequently needed to be in the sixth, and two and a half rounds on the scorecard when you factor into the equation Cavalleri’s 10-8.

Anyone who chooses professional boxing as a means of making a living is clearly a bit mad but there is a particular lunacy to Taylor that when she is confronted by any kind of machoism by her opponent, she can’t resist the temptation to tear up her own gameplan and swing for the fences.

“There’s not going to be a lot of feeling out in the second fight,” she said after Tuesday’s public workout. “We know each other so well. We spent 10 rounds together so we’re just going to go straight into an all-out war, I think, again.

“The last fight was Fight of the Year, and this time I can’t expect anything less.”

That would be a disaster from an Irish perspective, albeit Taylor was probably playing the saleswoman with about a hundred cameras fixated upon her.

In less public chats, she has admitted that she hopes tonight’s rematch is not quite as exciting, and has stressed the importance of “discipline”.

The degree to which she can stay out of harm’s way and use her superior technical boxing skills to beat Serrano for a second time will be largely predicated upon what’s left in her legs.

Taylor endured calf troubles for several years even before the original Madison Square Garden classic and, two and a half years on, at the age of 38, it’s hard to make the case that she’ll be more mobile. Perhaps, though, her year out of the ring will engender a freshness rather than a sense of rust.

Serrano, meanwhile, was asked this week by Colm Keys of the Irish Independent if, in hindsight, she would have done anything differently after their original fifth round that would have helped her to finish the job against her career-long nemesis.

“Well, we’ve trained to come out every round just like that,” Serrano said. “So, in the sixth round, I would have come out just as hard as I’m going to do this time. It’s about fighting for every minute, every second of the fight.”

Again, that’s far easier said than done.

Serrano, for all of her world-class qualities, is not especially good at cutting the ring off. Her feet have never been the quickest and she tends to stalk opponents around the ring rather than create angles from which she could achieve maximum leverage with her concrete fists. It’s enough to beat 95% of female boxers but if you let an opponent of Taylor’s calibre off the hook, you’re bound to pay the price.

It’s worth noting, too, that Serrano is only two years Taylor’s junior at 36. She’s been boxing for 17 years, 15 of them in the professional ring. She’s had 50 pro fights, albeit she has finished plenty of them quickly. That still amounts to thousands of rounds of sparring, all of which incrementally take their toll on an athlete’s body.

The seven-weight world champ has boxed five times since MSG and four of those bouts have gone the distance. Her 2023 victory over Erika Cruz was a fight-of-the-year contender and will have added a similar kind of mileage to the clock as one of Taylor’s bouts with Chantelle Cameron, for example.

There’s a strong case to be made that neither she nor Taylor are quite the same fighter as they were on that famous night at Madison Square Garden.

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Taylor’s ring IQ is such that she tends to flourish in rematches. She had the muscle memory and made the necessary adjustments to defeat Delfine Persoon more comprehensively the second time around and she most recently avenged her sole career defeat to Chantelle Cameron.

Still, there is a lingering sense that she will need to clearly win seven or eight of tonight’s 10 rounds if she is to go 2-0 against Serrano and close the book on their rivalry.

While this is very much a Mike Tyson event, it’s a Jake Paul show and that makes Serrano, who boxes under Paul’s MVP banner, very much the home fighter.

In the ether is a trilogy bout in which both boxers would stand to earn even more than their combined $14m purse ($8m to Serrano, $6.1m). Their rubber match would also be a useful accessory for Paul, should he manage to beat Tyson, or to virtually anyone who makes money from boxing.

This is not to suggest that Paul or MVP Promotions will have actively influenced the officials; the YouTuber-turned-boxer has an ongoing lawsuit against Eddie Hearn for falsely accusing him of doing the same. But we’ve all seen enough of this putrid business to know that judges will often side with what the game wants.

Taylor and Serrano have been inseparable for the bones of eight years and if tonight comes down to a virtual coin-flip, it will go the way of the Puerto Rican.

Not for the first time, a Taylor victory in the circumstances would be the greatest of her career. It might even be her last.