Weekend Shortlist: The Winners and Losers

THE weekend over pugilistic offerings given out over the past three nights, thrilled Australian boxing fans and the community alike with a pallet of emotions displayed like few others seen globally. In the next set of paragraphs, we try to give you the best of the bunch – as quick as we possibly can – and with that we approach our first Weekend Shortlist.

MOST DESERVING
 
Michael Katsidis: Much like the roller coaster ride his career has been, nothing has come easy for the Toowoomba-based Katsidis, aptly nicknamed ‘The Great’. After two very long years away from the limelight, Katsidis was given his well overdue return. Not without it’s bumps and bruises outside the ring, Katsidis had a rather easy time inside of it – and rightly so.
 

Few can argue if any one boxer in Australia deserved a comfortable night at the office, it’s without a doubt him. Any resume that features names like Juan Manuel Marquez, Joel Casamayor, Robert Gurrerro alongside a slew of others deserves the occasional soft-touch and with all due respect to Eddy Comaro, that’s exactly what it was. We look forward to seeing the final chapter of Katsidis’ career progress and hopefully that’ll be on his terms.

MOST UNLUCKY
 

Leroy Brown: Not let’s set the record straight, we’re not saying for a minute that Dennis Hogan is an undeserving Australian champion – far from it. Anyone who fights the likes of Nathan Carroll, Robbie Bryant and Leroy Brown back-to-back and wins, deserves a stack of credit. However, for someone that spent a year on the shelf and takes on someone like Hogan for his first fight back, a lot of credit needs to go to the way of the ‘Narooma Booma’ otherwise known as Leroy Brown.
 
In Dennis Hogan, Brown fought a fighter that quite literally nobody wanted to fight. If you don’t believe us, just ask Hogan’s management, who searched far and wide for a credible opponent for their active charge and they found one in Brown. In all honesty, in a day of record-padding and falsity, it’s sad to see a fighter of Leroy Brown’s calibre with six losses next to his name, it just doesn’t add up.

 
MOST ENTERTAINING
 
Kris George: Talk about an arrival. If you weren’t familiar with Kris George before this weekend, we wouldn’t blame you – but boy did he make a statement – and in some style too. If you didn’t catch it, George picked up the vacant Queensland title in a local derby with the flamboyant Ozan ‘Crash’ Craddock. It may have only went for three rounds, but it did not disappoint. Craddock hadn’t tasted the canvas in over seventy fights as an amateur or professional but that all changed when a sweeping left-hook followed by a pin-point right hand sealed the deal for the now very much known Kris George. We’d like to see a lot more of him in 2014.

And for those who haven’t seen the explosive knockout, your missing out.

MOST IMPRESSIVE
 

LiveBoxing.com.au: There are quite literally a stack of cards that go untelevised, given the select few that are televised nationally on Fox Sports, there are a lot of cards that quite simply, slip right under the radar. However, this changed over the weekend with Live Boxing, a website where previously low-key fight nights are now streamed live world-wide, for a small fee of course.
 
The two cards that we caught over the weekend delivered and if it wasn’t for this newly-found gem streaming these fights, we would’ve missed out big time. To the team and Live Boxing, we salute you.