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Time for the Hitman to ring the bell

3rd Feb 2010

Out Cold: A bro­ken Hat­ton after his brief encounter with Pacquiao

In case you saw cov­er­age of the Aus­tralian Open and thought to your­self, ‘who’s that chubby lit­tle mon­ster in the crowd the TV cam­era­man keeps pan­ning to?’ dur­ing Andy Murray’s semi final vic­tory, it turns out it was Ricky Hat­ton. He’s changed a bit hasn’t he?

Now when I saw this I thought fair enough, the lad’s just enjoy­ing his retire­ment, I mean he’s earned it in recent years tak­ing a pound­ing against supe­rior oppo­si­tion. But then I turned on Sky Sports News and every­thing changed. That yel­low ticker tape of break­ing news was scrolling by, I thought prob­a­bly just another of John Terry’s indis­cre­tions, or maybe Neil Warnock’s actu­ally accepted a loss with­out plac­ing the blame at the referee’s door, but instead I got some­thing much more shock­ing, this chubby lit­tle mon­ster was to return to ring.

Ricky Fat­ton: The Hit­man has obvi­ously been enjoy­ing a break from boxing

Now Ricky Hatton’s web­site states that the Hit­man has been keep­ing busy inside and out­side the gym, although judg­ing by recent pic­tures of Hat­ton if you were to ven­ture inside Ricky’s gym you would be a lonely fig­ure. He recently declared his inten­tion to return to the ring in 2010 and although a spe­cific date remains elu­sive as yet, he speaks firmly of his desire to don the gloves once more.

How­ever, this return to box­ing, nine months after his cat­a­strophic and humil­i­at­ing sec­ond round defeat against Manny Pac­quiao, has prompted many to ques­tion the wis­dom of Hatton’s desire to fight once again. The defeat against Pac­quiao, so vio­lent and com­pre­hen­sive, was thought to sig­nal the end of an illus­tri­ous box­ing career of one of England’s favourite sons. How­ever, recent noises from Hatton’s own chan­nel, Hat­ton TV, sug­gest a pos­si­ble fight against Juan Manuel Mar­quez before the end of the year. Surely the moti­va­tion for this is pride; to end his career with a vic­tory rather than flat on his back, semi con­scious and semi naked in Las Vegas (although that doesn’t sound too bad) but a vic­tory against a jour­ney­man oppo­nent would prove nothing.

Hat­ton him­self said: “If I won the next fight I would prob­a­bly call it a day… I don’t want the last mem­ory of me to be lying on my back” but then com­pletely con­tra­dicted this by say­ing: “I’ve boxed at such a high level and I could not have one more fight and peo­ple look at me and go ‘he’s just had this fight just to knock some­one over and end on top’. I want peo­ple to say ‘give Ricky his credit — he fin­ished at the top’.” Ricky, I’m sorry but you can’t have it both ways, either you want to sim­ply fin­ish with a win and that’s fine, if it’s an issue of pride go ahead, you only have your­self to con­vince, or rather you want to be the best and fight the best, which, although com­mend­able, is unre­al­is­tic, fin­ish­ing at the top is not really an option any more.