The Leeds fans chanted: “We want Selby” at the First Direct Arena and that’s next for Josh Warrington after he knocked out Dennis Ceylan in the 10th round of their IBF featherweight title eliminator.
The referee counted out the former European champion in the act of rising from a second knockdown.
The result makes Warrington the mandatory challenger for Lee Selby – and the fight has been ordered to take place by next March.
“If we can make it at Elland Road, let’s have it,” said Warrington.
Warrington was rather hard on himself after his 26th straight win. He described his performance as “erratic,” but he impressed the three judges enough to be ahead on all the scorecards.
Two of the judges had him up 88-83 and the other had him ahead 86-85.
From where Boxing Social was sitting, Warrington boxed well enough, pacing the fight just about perfectly.
There were close rounds in the first half of the fight when Warrington boxed predominantly from the outside.
But from the sixth, he started to get on the front foot and put his punches together – and Ceylan started to fall apart.
The Dane flopped exhausted onto his stool at the end of the eighth having ended the session under heavy fire, Warrington kept him under pressure in the ninth and got the knockout in the next.
Warrington put him on his back with a flurry. Up at ‘eight,’ Ceylan didn’t look like he could take much more – and so it proved.
Warrington fired off another volley to drop him in a heap again. This time, Ceylan got up just as the count reached ’10.’
The British super-lightweight championship changed hands when Chorley southpaw Jack Catterll unanimously outpointed Tyrone Nurse.
Scores were 118-111, 116-113 and 115-114. The fight was scrappy – “Not one for the DVD collection” was how BT Sport commentator John Rawling put it – and Catterall was more effective in more rounds than Nurse.
Not for the first time in his career, the Yorkshireman, fighting to win the Lonsdale belt outright, gave up his physical advantages – and Catterall outworked him on the inside in a bruising fight when heads bumped often.
The 10 rounder between Lyon Woodstock jr and Craig Poxton is likely to feature in the domestic fight-of-the-year polls.
Woodstock took the vacant WBO European super-featherweight title by grinding out a unanimous points win.
The fight was in the balance after six rounds, but the 24 year old from Leicester swept the final four sessions on two of the cards and three of the last four on the other.
Scores of 98-93 and 97-93 were too wide for Poxton’s corner. They felt the 97-95 scorecard was the better reflection of a hard fight.
Poxton fought from the second round with a bad gash on his right eyebrow, caused by a punch said referee Steve Gray, that cut man Mervyn Turner did well to keep under control.
Woodstock didn’t get the exclamation win he wanted, but in outlasting Poxton in a gruelling battle of wills, he proved his chin, his will to win and his engine.
He pulled away when the pace dropped in the closing rounds and when both went for broke in the final three minutes, Woodstock got the better of it and had the Lowestoft scrapper on rubbery legs a couple of times.
The polished Zelfa Barrett is a possible future opponent for Woodstock. ‘Brown Flash’ picked up the vacant English 9st 4lbs strap by knocking out Chris Conwell in the fourth of a scheduled 10.
Barrett smashed Conwell to his knees in the fourth with a right hand to the side of the head and finished the fight with a quality left hook to the body.
Pain was etched on Conwell’s face as the referee counted him out.