Justice For Daniel

By Frank Warren

THE VERY ASTUTE Carl Frampton was right first time, if the rules were followed to the letter, we would now have a new unified heavyweight world champion.

Instead, the excellent current champion remains on his throne, with his game challenger left to lick his wounds.

However, it won’t be quite as straightforward as that because we intend to throw our weight behind our man Daniel Dubois to seek justice over the incident in the pivotal fifth round when Oleksandr Usyk was bludgeoned to the canvas and would have been out for the count, had there been one.

It really is largely irrelevant whether Daniel was being outgunned, outpointed or out-skilled by the ring-smart two-weight world champion. That was to be expected, we knew that and outfoxing him wasn’t part of the grand plan.

The strategy devised involved targeting the one weakness identified in the great Ukrainian. He is a bit suspect when it comes to the body.

Daniel and his team knew that landing on the money was key to achieving an against-all-odds triumph. And that is exactly what he did inside the first 30 seconds or so of the fifth round.

Usyk himself was clearly fearful of this tactic reaping rewards and he, successfully you could say, planted an early narrative in the mind of referee Luis Pabon by flinching several times and gesturing south of the border in the opening stages.

This resulted in an easy assumption when the bullseye was landed that the blow was low.

However, it was clearly outlined in the rules meeting beforehand that such a shot was indeed legitimate, meaning Daniel has been denied his moment of glory.

People now say Usyk would have got up if a count had commenced, but how they can be so sure of this is beyond me. He was doubled up and shaking like a leaf, such was the ferocity of the strike.

There is little value in repeating all the technical details here because people will, or have, made up their own minds having viewed some clever imagery or listened to some of the usual suspects with their utterly predictable agenda-driven rhetoric.

We have had a lot of support on this from a number of very influential and, more importantly, independent people and we are currently in the process of putting together a compelling case to put forward to the WBA.

The least Daniel should receive is an ordered rematch. More appropriate would be the fight being declared a no-contest.

Yes, Daniel should and could have done more in the fight and we are not questioning the dominance of Usyk overall, but the defining moment crucially went against Daniel and this was wrong. The referee made a mistake and, as far as it can be after the event, the situation needs to be rectified.

Whatever the outcome - and we want a speedy resolution - Daniel will take a lot from this experience and will understand more what is required to operate at this level.

He is just 25 years of age and has a big future in front of him, but we could have been talking about the here and now had events played out correctly in Poland.

On the flip side of the coin, Hamzah Sheeraz flew the Queensberry flag with absolute distinction on the night with a spectacular second round stoppage over the previously undefeated home fighter Dmytro Mytrofanov.

Our middleweight star didn’t put a foot or a fist wrong in dismantling the storied former amateur star with a perfect hurtful jab and Mytrofanov quickly found himself right out of his depth.

Hamzah has got world champion written all over him and I don’t think I am looking too far into the future in that assessment.

Congratulations also go to our unbeaten lightweight Denys Berinchyk, who we co-promote, for his convincing victory over Anthony Yigit.