SHAKUR STEVENSON successfully defended his WBC lightweight title via ninth round stoppage of Josh Padley but the Yorkshire electrician put in a valiant effort on three days’ notice.
Padley had been expecting to watch this card at home on the sofa with his feet up but when a fight week illness ruled Floyd Schofield out of his clash with Stevenson the search began for a late replacement.
And ‘Paddy’, who was working in a loft when the call came through on Tuesday, was happy to finish his job before boarding a flight to Riyadh for one of the most unlikely world title shots in British history.
He successfully made weight for the contest but was unsurprisingly given almost no chance by the oddsmakers against the undefeated WBC king Stevenson, who had been almost flawless in his 22 fights to date.
And that trend continued at the Venue in Riyadh in this fight but Padley would not go down without a fight. In the end, he was dropped three times in the ninth but beat the count on all three occasions and was only stopped by the towel, which was thrown in by his corner as the bell sounded to end the round.
He had made a decent start to the fight, too, shaping up nicely against Stevenson, who was his second successive southpaw following his September victory over Mark Chamberlain.
But Stevenson landed two big left hands in quick succession in the second as he began to work out the distance and assume full control of proceedings.
It was pretty much one-way traffic from then although Stevenson was never working at a pace that Padley was unable to handle. Instead, it was a low volume chess match that Stevenson was dictating.
But Padley was handling it well until a hard left hand to the body seemed to hurt him late in the fifth. He responded by throwing a few shots of his own but Stevenson was unfazed. And the champion decided to up the pace in the sixth, effortlessly switching his attack from head to body but Padley would not go quietly, landing a solid left hook to the body of his own.
The pattern was set and Stevenson continued to relentlessly find the target against Padley. Before the start of the ninth, the Yorkshireman’s coach Jason Cunningham warned him that he would not hesitate to pull him out if the fight continued in a similar manner. “You need to be busier,” Cunningham said.
Stevenson finally dropped the valiant Padley midway through the ninth but the challenger climbed back to his feet and then fired back, much to the delight of the crowd. But it was not long before Stevenson found his second knockdown with another hard bodyshot.
Up stepped Padley again but yet another bodyshot put a frustrated Padley over for a third time. And, although he got back on his feet for a third time as the bell rang to end the ninth, Cunningham had already thrown in the towel. The official time, therefore, was 3:00 of R9 with Padley now 15-1 (4) while Stevenson moves to 23-0 (11).
