Results from Leeds: Josh Warrington Wins Big; Dillian Whyte Wins Small

Results from Leeds – On Saturday, July 30, Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing promoted a mammoth 15-bout card at First District Arena in Leeds in the county of Yorkshire. A 12-round featherweight contest between local fan favorite Josh Warrington (23-0) and Dublin’s Patrick Hyland (31-2) topped the marquee. Warrington was a solid favorite and delighted his fans with a dominant performance. He knocked Hyland to the canvas in the eighth round and twice more in the ninth before the bout was halted.

Hyland, who turns 33 in September, never landed a meaningful punch and looked older than his years. Warrington, who scored only four knockouts in his first 23 fights, seems to have found the tonic he needed to make him a bigger puncher. He entered the contest ranked #1 in his division by the IBF and cemented that ranking. Up next for the Leeds man, if his handlers can arrange it, is a match with Lee Selby, the Welshman who reigns as the IBF World featherweight champion.

Results from Leeds

From an international perspective, the most interesting fight on the card was the 10-round heavyweight match between Dillian Whyte and David Allen. Whyte’s lone defeat in his first 18 fights came at the hands of Anthony Joshua and while Whyte was knocked out cleanly in the seventh stanza he remained an intriguing prospect. In that fight, he buckled Joshua’s knees in round two with a left uppercut and hurt his shoulder in the process. Whyte, who beat Anthony Joshua in the amateurs, would claim that if not for that injury, which required surgery, he would have defeated the current IBF World heavyweight champion. In David Allen, he was meeting a 9-0-1 Yorkshireman who has sparred frequently with Joshua and claims that he repeatedly had the best of it.

That allegation is tough to swallow after Allen was outclassed by Whyte in what was an uneventful fight. Many in the crowd booed as the bout entered the final seconds. Whyte won lopsidedly, scoring a shutout on two of the scorecards, but did little to burnish his reputation.

In a 12-round lightweight contest, Luke Campbell, 14-1 (11) out-worked Argenis Mendez en route to winning a unanimous decision. Campbell was a gold medal winner at the 2012 Olympics, a feat that earned him an MBE (the acronym stands for the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire; the British sure do prize their champions). Mendez, who had a short reign as the IBF World featherweight champion, had little interest in mixing it up after scoring the bout’s lone knockdown in the second round. The Brooklyn-based fighter from the Dominican Republic is 2-3-1 with one no-decision in his last seven starts.

The all-Yorkshire affair between Tyrone Nurse and Tommy Coyle was a corking good fight. Nurse successfully defended his British 140-pound title with a 12-round unanimous decision. Coyle’s left eye started swelling in round three, but he stayed the course and did some of his best work in the late rounds, albeit ultimately to no avail. The final scores were 116-112 and 115-113 twice. Nurse improves to 34-2-1 (7), Coyle declines to 22-4.

In another bout of note, Vincent Feigenbutz, the 20-year-old German who briefly held the WBA 168-pound title, dismissed Spanish journeyman Wilmer Gonzalez in the second stanza.

Results from Leeds