AS YOU GET older, you can sometimes feel a core memory calcify in your consciousness as it plays out in real time. The 11th hour of Super Saturday delivered one such moment.
Boxing events at the 3Arena have been scarce since The Bernard Dunne Days™, world-title fights on Dublin’s Docklands rarer still. As the bones of 8,500 people bellowed out ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries, to the stage marched Anthony Cacace, the beloved Belfast super-featherweight seeking to become a two-time world champion. Victory over Liverpool’s Jazza Dickens would make him a hen’s tooth in Irish boxing terms.
To cover such an event in person is usually to forget that there exists a whole world outside the venue. Had nuclear Armageddon visited the capital while the fights were on, we would have emerged from the 3Arena like mice from their hibernal caves after a meteorite had wiped out most of the dinosaurs; bleary-eyed, puzzled and peckish.
On this occasion, however, word infiltrated our bunker on North Wall Quay to bring news even more seismic: England were up in the rugby.
Ireland were two minutes away from being crowned Six Nations champions. Holy Jaysus.
Cacace lands a jab on champion Jazza Dickens. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
England rugby star Henry Pollock. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
And so several of us on press row, and a few more boxing supporters from the expensive seats directly behind us, became optic gymnasts, our left eyes strained to track Cacace’s ascent to the ring, our right eyes glued to a France-England stream on this writer’s phone.
‘And the violence caused such silence/Who are we mistaken?’
Go on Pollock ya f***ing legend ya!
‘With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns…’
What the f*** are you doing Pollock you clown!?!
‘Zaw-awm-beh, zaw-awm-beh, zaw-awm-beh-eh-eh…’
Ramos doesn’t miss these. Erra, the French deserved it.
Complete sensory overload. Exhilaration and exasperation. Ears ringing, eyes cramping, hearts racing, nerves shot to shit; fingers trembling as they returned to their station at my laptop, although the mainlining of three coffees at the Aviva Stadium hours earlier might have accounted for that.
This is why we do it.
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As 130-pound champion Jazza Dickens followed Cacace through the ropes, my thoughts wandered as far back as the equivalent Saturday 17 years ago, when Ireland secured their first Six Nations Grand Slam in 61 years before Bernard Dunne twice climbed off the canvas to stop Ricardo Cordoba for his own crowning glory just metres from my seat.
Super Saturday 2009 was spent mostly in the living room of our family friends in Glenbrook, where my father very nearly booted the Buckleys’ television into Cork Harbour, so feral was his reaction to Tommy Bowe’s try in Cardiff. Only we kids noticed the TV wobble on its stand, and while the adults bounced around the room, one of us — it might have been Killian Buckley, who remains one of my closest friends — steadied it with one hand while fist-pumping with the other.
Later that night, as referee Hubert Earle spared Ricardo Cordoba from himself and Bernard Dunne faceplanted onto the ring canvas in ecstasy, I curtailed my own celebrations and made a beeline for the Buckleys’ flatscreen lest a flailing adult limb threaten it once more.
Paul O'Connell celebrates Ireland's Grand Slam in 2009. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
Bernard Dunne approaches the ring at the The Point (file photo). Donall Farmer / INPHO
Donall Farmer / INPHO / INPHO
I had inherited my love for rugby, GAA and soccer from my father but he had taken an interest in boxing only for me. To see Dunne’s victory mean so much to him was gratifying, much the same as when I had convinced him to watch The Dark Knight with me some months earlier and he punctured our silence during the end credits to tell me it was one of the best films he’d ever seen.
Still, I was too young at 16 to realise that I would carry with me the blissful imagery from the Buckleys’ living room for the rest of my days. Only when Dad passed away just over a year later would I truly come to treasure it, and even protect it.
Thankfully, I have never yet had to consult with the notebook into which I scribbled all of the happy memories I have of my aul’ fella. I just know that half of them revolve around sport.
This is why we do it.
***
We’re lucky to have Anthony Cacace; not only within boxing, where he has always been adored by Ireland’s small community of hardcores and where he is these days revered by experts to either side of the Atlantic, but in broader Irish sport, whose pantheon of greats he joined on Saturday night as he became a two-time world champion.
There is an authenticity to the late-blooming Cacace [25-1, 9KOs] which separates him from most of his peers. When he returned home to Andersonstown from his first world title success in 2024 — a sensational stoppage victory over Welshman Joe Cordina — there was a knock on his front door as locals attempted to lure him out for an open-top bus parade arranged in his honour. “I’m going nowhere until that bus is gone!” came Cacace’s response.
Sure enough, the bus was banished and, with some reluctance, ‘Anto’ traipsed on foot through his estate, in which hundreds of people had turned out in his honour. Even that was more adulation than that with which Cacace would typically be comfortable.
Anto Cacace's trademark post-fight celebration with a cigar. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
If one was to speak with him during fight week, they could be forgiven for believing Cacace an entirely Normal Human Being. But to watch him box is to be immediately disabused of that notion. That Cacace himself has to negotiate the tension between those extremes, and that he’s comfortable enough in his own skin at 37 to freely discuss it all, adds to his magnetism.
As he sat into his chair in the 3Arena’s press-conference room in the early hours of Sunday morning, then, it seemed curious that Cacace appeared a touch subdued. He was, as it turned out, fairly disgusted by his performance, which had been enough to earn a narrow unanimous decision — 115-113, 116-112, 116-113 — over Jazza Dickens and take the world title up the M1.
Cacace revealed that an injury to his left hand early in his training camp had left unable to spar in the months leading up to his career-biggest fight, his first-ever headline slot in his home country. And having gone almost entirely without the most crucial component of any boxer’s preparation, ‘The Apache’ admitted his mind had begun to wander — and indeed wonder — as he geared up in the bowels of the 3Arena.
“Tonight was the toughest [night of my career], to be honest with ya,” Cacace said. “I knew I was carrying an injury, I hadn’t fought in a brave while. It was mentally challenging in the changing room beforehand. Just being real: it was tough.”
Asked by The 42 what had exactly had run through his mind, Cacace replied with a shrug: “I was doubting myself. As you do — just wee doubts: ‘Ah fuck, I haven’t sparred. I haven’t done this. I haven’t done that.’ Just self-doubts.
“And obviously, I’ve been a world champion before. But this was different. This was to go down in the history books,” added Cacace, who joined rare company as a two-time belt holder from Ireland.
“But I’m a fighter and I’m a winner, like. I’m a born winner. I’ll do anything to keep winning. It’s just in me, mate. It’s born and bred into me, I suppose.”
Cacace was still in fine form, mind. When promoter Frank Warren insisted that he should be proud of his achievement, he interjected: “I’m proud, Frank, like. I’m super-proud!” But he again acknowledged that his second world-title success felt “different”, bringing with it a more personal satisfaction: he had overcome his intrusive thoughts from beforehand to deliver a victory that was, in a sense, one for himself.
The first one, back in 2024, had been more about “putting my daddy’s name down in the history books”, explained the new champion, whose father, Tony Cacace, hails from a tiny village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
“‘Cacace…’ No one had really heard of Cacace, obviously. Now, the name is known, d’you know what I mean? No matter what happens, you can always look back and say, ‘Anto Cacace was a two-time super-featherweight champion of the world.’
His own three children will be able to do the same, and they likely won’t need to consult a great deal with YouTube years down the line. A rare beauty to Cacace’s heyday arriving in his mid-to-late 30s is that nights like last Saturday will surely become core memories for Cadhla (17), Cillian (9) and Ava (6), who, to varying degrees, can already appreciate how much their father means to thousands of people around Belfast and elsewhere.
Cacace celebrates Saturday's success with a supporter. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
That Cacace, his partner Sinead, and the three kids are in the process of moving into a bigger house will only add to the excitement of the coming weeks.
“I’m looking forward to a pizza,” Cacace said on Saturday, before specifically shouting out Nico’s Pizza on the Lisburn Road, for whom he was a delivery driver during an earlier stage of his boxing career.
“I just want to go home, have my kids around me, have the people I love around me, and have a pizza,” he smiled.
And this is why Anthony Cacace does it.
***
A message landed from light-welterweight Pierce O’Leary as I left Lansdowne Road on Saturday evening, bound for The Point: “Savage game.” He was spot-on.
I didn’t so much take the road from the Aviva Stadium to the 3Arena as I walked on air.
Ireland had sent the Scots homeward to think again. Dublin effervesced with a golden hue, the March sunshine having contributed handsomely to one of the most thrilling back-and-forths in Six Nations history. Even the seagulls’ squawks suddenly had a kind of musicality to them. Or maybe they were just normal birds.
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Ireland celebrate their final try through Tommy O'Brien. Nick Elliott / INPHO
Nick Elliott / INPHO / INPHO
After a nine-year absence during the profoundly depressing MTK Global/Daniel Kinahan era, the excitement for big-time boxing’s fifth run-out at the 3Arena since 2023 could be felt from as far back as Stella Gardens. People poured out of their doors around Dodder Park, while more still spilled out of The Oarsman and The Yachstman pubs in Ringsend as the procession entered Pierce O’Leary Country.
Across the bridge, the local hero from Sheriff Street was warming up for his career-biggest test, ‘Big Bang’ O’Leary squaring off with tricky South Yorkshireman Maxi Hughes. O’Leary’s auntie, Emma, meanwhile, was warming her vocal chords: she would later stiffen the hairs on the backs of 8,500-odd necks as she sang the light-welterweight to the ring to the tune of Christy Moore’s ‘Ride On’, a favourite song of her father, and Pierce’s grandfather, Paddy.
Pierce O'Leary is sang to the ring by his aunt, Emma O'Leary. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
The unbeaten O’Leary is understood to have sold over 5,000 tickets for Saturday’s Queensberry Boxing event, which is a rare thing at any level of professional boxing. Indeed, the 26-year-old’s demand was such that he was able to rid the burden of unsold tickets from boxers further down the undercard and ship those on himself, too.
O’Leary’s manager, Brian Peters, has twice sold out the 3Arena with Katie Taylor but not since Bernard Dunne has he boasted on his books a male boxer so capable of moving the needle in Ireland.
Taylor was ringside to watch her managerial stablemate’s breakout fight, O’Leary electrifying his home crowd as he bludgeoned the brave Hughes into a retirement on his stool between the fifth and sixth rounds, earning the 19th victory and 11th stoppage of his young career.
“Irish boxing is on my back!” he proclaimed afterwards. All evidence from Saturday would suggest that O’Leary was spot-on once more.
The rising light-welterweight star would appear to have it all: confidence, but with sufficient self-awareness that he remains on the right side of likeable to the previously unacquainted; a turn of phrase to make opponents blush and make the headline-writer’s job that little bit easier; a growing legion of supporters who feel a sense of belonging to his journey; and finally, he’ll puck the heads off lads if they’re not careful.
Manager Brian Peters, boxing legend Katie Taylor, and rising star Pierce O'Leary celebrate O'Leary's victory over Maxi Hughes. Gary Carr / INPHO
Gary Carr / INPHO / INPHO
Promoter Frank Warren, who’s been around the block at 74, described O’Leary’s ring-walk as having generated one of the best atmospheres he’s experienced in many years. He intends to bring O’Leary back to the 3Arena as the headliner in June. Some kind of Bernard Dunne-like residency at the venue may follow, as will world-title opportunities provided O’Leary continues to decorate his record with Ws.
A Big Bang indeed, then, for pro boxing in the capital. The next Six Nations-fight night doubleheader is unlikely to keep us waiting 17 years.
That my father was gone before I could ever express to him my interest in pursuing sports journalism can occasionally leave a knot in my stomach. He would have absolutely loved it, although I would have feared for the structural integrity of the telly in my absence last weekend.
Anyway, the less memorable outings on the job can teach you a few things, too: you can only control the controllables, for example.
I’ll take Super Saturday 2026 with me for as long as I live. I’ll remember who I was with. I’ll remember how it felt. I’ll remember the sportspeople who made us feel it.
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Super Saturday, sensory overload at ringside, and memories of a dad who would have loved it all
AS YOU GET older, you can sometimes feel a core memory calcify in your consciousness as it plays out in real time. The 11th hour of Super Saturday delivered one such moment.
Boxing events at the 3Arena have been scarce since The Bernard Dunne Days™, world-title fights on Dublin’s Docklands rarer still. As the bones of 8,500 people bellowed out ‘Zombie’ by the Cranberries, to the stage marched Anthony Cacace, the beloved Belfast super-featherweight seeking to become a two-time world champion. Victory over Liverpool’s Jazza Dickens would make him a hen’s tooth in Irish boxing terms.
To cover such an event in person is usually to forget that there exists a whole world outside the venue. Had nuclear Armageddon visited the capital while the fights were on, we would have emerged from the 3Arena like mice from their hibernal caves after a meteorite had wiped out most of the dinosaurs; bleary-eyed, puzzled and peckish.
On this occasion, however, word infiltrated our bunker on North Wall Quay to bring news even more seismic: England were up in the rugby.
Ireland were two minutes away from being crowned Six Nations champions. Holy Jaysus.
And so several of us on press row, and a few more boxing supporters from the expensive seats directly behind us, became optic gymnasts, our left eyes strained to track Cacace’s ascent to the ring, our right eyes glued to a France-England stream on this writer’s phone.
‘And the violence caused such silence/Who are we mistaken?’
Go on Pollock ya f***ing legend ya!
‘With their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs, and their guns…’
What the f*** are you doing Pollock you clown!?!
‘Zaw-awm-beh, zaw-awm-beh, zaw-awm-beh-eh-eh…’
Ramos doesn’t miss these. Erra, the French deserved it.
Complete sensory overload. Exhilaration and exasperation. Ears ringing, eyes cramping, hearts racing, nerves shot to shit; fingers trembling as they returned to their station at my laptop, although the mainlining of three coffees at the Aviva Stadium hours earlier might have accounted for that.
This is why we do it.
As 130-pound champion Jazza Dickens followed Cacace through the ropes, my thoughts wandered as far back as the equivalent Saturday 17 years ago, when Ireland secured their first Six Nations Grand Slam in 61 years before Bernard Dunne twice climbed off the canvas to stop Ricardo Cordoba for his own crowning glory just metres from my seat.
Super Saturday 2009 was spent mostly in the living room of our family friends in Glenbrook, where my father very nearly booted the Buckleys’ television into Cork Harbour, so feral was his reaction to Tommy Bowe’s try in Cardiff. Only we kids noticed the TV wobble on its stand, and while the adults bounced around the room, one of us — it might have been Killian Buckley, who remains one of my closest friends — steadied it with one hand while fist-pumping with the other.
Later that night, as referee Hubert Earle spared Ricardo Cordoba from himself and Bernard Dunne faceplanted onto the ring canvas in ecstasy, I curtailed my own celebrations and made a beeline for the Buckleys’ flatscreen lest a flailing adult limb threaten it once more.
I had inherited my love for rugby, GAA and soccer from my father but he had taken an interest in boxing only for me. To see Dunne’s victory mean so much to him was gratifying, much the same as when I had convinced him to watch The Dark Knight with me some months earlier and he punctured our silence during the end credits to tell me it was one of the best films he’d ever seen.
Still, I was too young at 16 to realise that I would carry with me the blissful imagery from the Buckleys’ living room for the rest of my days. Only when Dad passed away just over a year later would I truly come to treasure it, and even protect it.
Thankfully, I have never yet had to consult with the notebook into which I scribbled all of the happy memories I have of my aul’ fella. I just know that half of them revolve around sport.
This is why we do it.
***
We’re lucky to have Anthony Cacace; not only within boxing, where he has always been adored by Ireland’s small community of hardcores and where he is these days revered by experts to either side of the Atlantic, but in broader Irish sport, whose pantheon of greats he joined on Saturday night as he became a two-time world champion.
There is an authenticity to the late-blooming Cacace [25-1, 9KOs] which separates him from most of his peers. When he returned home to Andersonstown from his first world title success in 2024 — a sensational stoppage victory over Welshman Joe Cordina — there was a knock on his front door as locals attempted to lure him out for an open-top bus parade arranged in his honour. “I’m going nowhere until that bus is gone!” came Cacace’s response.
Sure enough, the bus was banished and, with some reluctance, ‘Anto’ traipsed on foot through his estate, in which hundreds of people had turned out in his honour. Even that was more adulation than that with which Cacace would typically be comfortable.
If one was to speak with him during fight week, they could be forgiven for believing Cacace an entirely Normal Human Being. But to watch him box is to be immediately disabused of that notion. That Cacace himself has to negotiate the tension between those extremes, and that he’s comfortable enough in his own skin at 37 to freely discuss it all, adds to his magnetism.
As he sat into his chair in the 3Arena’s press-conference room in the early hours of Sunday morning, then, it seemed curious that Cacace appeared a touch subdued. He was, as it turned out, fairly disgusted by his performance, which had been enough to earn a narrow unanimous decision — 115-113, 116-112, 116-113 — over Jazza Dickens and take the world title up the M1.
Cacace revealed that an injury to his left hand early in his training camp had left unable to spar in the months leading up to his career-biggest fight, his first-ever headline slot in his home country. And having gone almost entirely without the most crucial component of any boxer’s preparation, ‘The Apache’ admitted his mind had begun to wander — and indeed wonder — as he geared up in the bowels of the 3Arena.
“Tonight was the toughest [night of my career], to be honest with ya,” Cacace said. “I knew I was carrying an injury, I hadn’t fought in a brave while. It was mentally challenging in the changing room beforehand. Just being real: it was tough.”
Asked by The 42 what had exactly had run through his mind, Cacace replied with a shrug: “I was doubting myself. As you do — just wee doubts: ‘Ah fuck, I haven’t sparred. I haven’t done this. I haven’t done that.’ Just self-doubts.
“And obviously, I’ve been a world champion before. But this was different. This was to go down in the history books,” added Cacace, who joined rare company as a two-time belt holder from Ireland.
“But I’m a fighter and I’m a winner, like. I’m a born winner. I’ll do anything to keep winning. It’s just in me, mate. It’s born and bred into me, I suppose.”
Cacace was still in fine form, mind. When promoter Frank Warren insisted that he should be proud of his achievement, he interjected: “I’m proud, Frank, like. I’m super-proud!” But he again acknowledged that his second world-title success felt “different”, bringing with it a more personal satisfaction: he had overcome his intrusive thoughts from beforehand to deliver a victory that was, in a sense, one for himself.
The first one, back in 2024, had been more about “putting my daddy’s name down in the history books”, explained the new champion, whose father, Tony Cacace, hails from a tiny village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast.
“‘Cacace…’ No one had really heard of Cacace, obviously. Now, the name is known, d’you know what I mean? No matter what happens, you can always look back and say, ‘Anto Cacace was a two-time super-featherweight champion of the world.’
His own three children will be able to do the same, and they likely won’t need to consult a great deal with YouTube years down the line. A rare beauty to Cacace’s heyday arriving in his mid-to-late 30s is that nights like last Saturday will surely become core memories for Cadhla (17), Cillian (9) and Ava (6), who, to varying degrees, can already appreciate how much their father means to thousands of people around Belfast and elsewhere.
That Cacace, his partner Sinead, and the three kids are in the process of moving into a bigger house will only add to the excitement of the coming weeks.
“I’m looking forward to a pizza,” Cacace said on Saturday, before specifically shouting out Nico’s Pizza on the Lisburn Road, for whom he was a delivery driver during an earlier stage of his boxing career.
“I just want to go home, have my kids around me, have the people I love around me, and have a pizza,” he smiled.
And this is why Anthony Cacace does it.
***
A message landed from light-welterweight Pierce O’Leary as I left Lansdowne Road on Saturday evening, bound for The Point: “Savage game.” He was spot-on.
I didn’t so much take the road from the Aviva Stadium to the 3Arena as I walked on air.
Ireland had sent the Scots homeward to think again. Dublin effervesced with a golden hue, the March sunshine having contributed handsomely to one of the most thrilling back-and-forths in Six Nations history. Even the seagulls’ squawks suddenly had a kind of musicality to them. Or maybe they were just normal birds.
After a nine-year absence during the profoundly depressing MTK Global/Daniel Kinahan era, the excitement for big-time boxing’s fifth run-out at the 3Arena since 2023 could be felt from as far back as Stella Gardens. People poured out of their doors around Dodder Park, while more still spilled out of The Oarsman and The Yachstman pubs in Ringsend as the procession entered Pierce O’Leary Country.
Across the bridge, the local hero from Sheriff Street was warming up for his career-biggest test, ‘Big Bang’ O’Leary squaring off with tricky South Yorkshireman Maxi Hughes. O’Leary’s auntie, Emma, meanwhile, was warming her vocal chords: she would later stiffen the hairs on the backs of 8,500-odd necks as she sang the light-welterweight to the ring to the tune of Christy Moore’s ‘Ride On’, a favourite song of her father, and Pierce’s grandfather, Paddy.
The unbeaten O’Leary is understood to have sold over 5,000 tickets for Saturday’s Queensberry Boxing event, which is a rare thing at any level of professional boxing. Indeed, the 26-year-old’s demand was such that he was able to rid the burden of unsold tickets from boxers further down the undercard and ship those on himself, too.
O’Leary’s manager, Brian Peters, has twice sold out the 3Arena with Katie Taylor but not since Bernard Dunne has he boasted on his books a male boxer so capable of moving the needle in Ireland.
Taylor was ringside to watch her managerial stablemate’s breakout fight, O’Leary electrifying his home crowd as he bludgeoned the brave Hughes into a retirement on his stool between the fifth and sixth rounds, earning the 19th victory and 11th stoppage of his young career.
“Irish boxing is on my back!” he proclaimed afterwards. All evidence from Saturday would suggest that O’Leary was spot-on once more.
The rising light-welterweight star would appear to have it all: confidence, but with sufficient self-awareness that he remains on the right side of likeable to the previously unacquainted; a turn of phrase to make opponents blush and make the headline-writer’s job that little bit easier; a growing legion of supporters who feel a sense of belonging to his journey; and finally, he’ll puck the heads off lads if they’re not careful.
Promoter Frank Warren, who’s been around the block at 74, described O’Leary’s ring-walk as having generated one of the best atmospheres he’s experienced in many years. He intends to bring O’Leary back to the 3Arena as the headliner in June. Some kind of Bernard Dunne-like residency at the venue may follow, as will world-title opportunities provided O’Leary continues to decorate his record with Ws.
A Big Bang indeed, then, for pro boxing in the capital. The next Six Nations-fight night doubleheader is unlikely to keep us waiting 17 years.
That my father was gone before I could ever express to him my interest in pursuing sports journalism can occasionally leave a knot in my stomach. He would have absolutely loved it, although I would have feared for the structural integrity of the telly in my absence last weekend.
Anyway, the less memorable outings on the job can teach you a few things, too: you can only control the controllables, for example.
I’ll take Super Saturday 2026 with me for as long as I live. I’ll remember who I was with. I’ll remember how it felt. I’ll remember the sportspeople who made us feel it.
Days like those are why I do it.
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Boxing column Rugby