It was asking a lot of Dillian Whyte and Derek Chisora to take up where they left off here two years ago, but they did exactly that. They likely will not want to do this again – unless the money is right. The capacity crowd of 20,000 roared their appreciation and sympathy when Chisora rose from his brief slumber, and the fighters who for more than half an hour had been trying to disable each other’s senses, embraced, as we knew they would. At the end Chisora was ahead by a point on two cards, behind by one on the other – and a winner in the hearts of the crowd.
The prize wasn’t just the considerable one of a shot at Anthony Joshua’s three world belts at Wembley on 13 April; they fought, with every ounce of strength and passion, for what someone once memorably said of the Ali-Frazier Thrilla in Manila: the championship of each other. It was Finchley against Brixton, too, a tribal showdown that had the packed arena enthralled from start to finish.
Chisora, who was Dereck and “Dell Boy” when he lost a close 12-round street fight to his Brixton tormentor in 2016, tried hard to live up to his new RING name, “WAR”, but almost didn’t get past the first skirmish when Whyte sent electricity through his legs in the first round.
He admitted the obvious beforehand – “I’m no boxer, man; I just fight” – and so it transpired that he ate a string of jabs for a meagre dividend in round two, before belting Whyte around the ring in the third.
Hitting high, low but not too handsome, Chisora cashed in on a fitness regime like none he had endured to carry the action all the way up to the middle rounds. But the old boy’s legs and lungs started to ask him increasingly difficult questions as Whyte picked his punches; what had begun as a hurricane looked like being downgraded to a tropical storm.
Marcus McDonnell docked Chisora a point in the eighth for persistent fouling, although it was tough to distinguish the legal from the illegal in either direction. He took another for an elbow in the 11th. Neither penalty deterred him, but Whyte’s left was the decider.
Several stones away at flyweight, Charlie Edwards, stopped in 10 rounds here two years ago when challenging John Riel Casimero for the IBF title, got his hands on the WBC version with the most complete, pure boxing performance by a London favourite called Charlie since Magri of that moniker won the lineal title 35 years ago.
Boxing from range with terrific hand speed and quicksilver footwork, Edwards ignored a veil of blood from his hairline for the last six rounds to beat the champion, Cristofer Rosales, 118-110, 117-111, 116-112. The baby-faced flyweight from Epsom might look like the brother of a Wimbledon ballboy (Sunny), but he fought like a Tiger all the way to a glorious finish, and dropped to his knees in tears at the end.
“That’s for you mum,” the new champion shouted out to his ill mother, who watched ringside in a wheelchair, as her son bamboozled one of the division’s most feared punchers. It is only four months since the heavy-handed Nicaraguan wrecked Paddy Barnes with a body shot in the fourth round in Belfast.
On an evening of varied heavyweight fare, the operator with the best nom de guerre in the division, Tom “Not So” Little, was soaking it up stoically against David Price when the referee, Keiran McCann, intervened 22 seconds from the end of the fourth round after the Liverpudlian steadied him with a couple of decent head shots.
The Hatfield man, all 18st 6lb of him, was upright, dazed but willing to continue. It was a woefully premature stoppage, but it keeps the 35-year-old Price, the former British, European and Commonwealth champion, in business after two stoppage losses.
“He should have at least let me go down to get up,” Little said. “I’m heartbroken.”
In the next bout, McCann waited until he’d seen the hopelessly outclassed German slugger, Senad Gashi, knocked down three times in the seventh before raising the hand of Carlos Takam, who gave Anthony Joshua a good argument then ran into a Chisora haymaker in his last fight. It was the Frenchman’s 36th win and keeps him on the fringes of good paydays.
Joshua Buatsi’s progress at light-heavyweight remains serene and scary. With a pair of clinical knockdowns, he did to the Australian Renold Quinlan in 110 seconds what it took Chris Eubank Jr 10 rounds to do last year, and he now owns the WBA’s International title, a useful door-opener. It was the south Londoner’s seventh stoppage from nine fights, his third in a row inside a round.
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