Beyond Boxing

People need to start asking Eddie Hearn what the real game is? He is definitely playing games with the fans.

Here’s the hard truth: Conor Benn is not Nigel Benn.

He never was. He doesn’t have what his father had, and Saturday night proved it in brutal fashion.

What we watched wasn’t just a loss. It was what happens when a kid from privilege steps into a sport built by people who either grew up hard, or trained hard enough from childhood to make up for it.

You can’t manufacture that. You can manufacture resilience, you cannot manufacture toughness.

Moses Itauma’s defeat on Saturday raises a question that is impossible to ignore: who is actually responsible for what happened?

There are really only two possibilities.

Either Ben Davison and his team had the right game plan, understood exactly what was happening in the ring, knew what Moses needed to do, and Moses ignored them.

Or they didn’t have the answers. They gambled on Moses knocking out his opponent early and, when that didn’t happen, there was no Plan B.

And if either of those scenarios is true, Moses has a serious problem.

Because if he ignored the right instructions, then he may be surrounded by people he doesn’t respect enough to listen to.

And if the instructions weren’t there, then he may be surrounded by people who simply aren’t capable of taking him to the level he wants to reach.

Either way, something has to change.

Moses is only 21. He has plenty of time to rebuild, learn and come again. But if he wants to become a world champion, and stay there, he has some brutally difficult decisions ahead of him about the people he trusts with his career.

The question isn’t simply “Why did Moses Itauma lose?”

The bigger question is:

“Is Moses Itauma surrounded by the right people to become a world champion?”

In boxing, nothing beats experience. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing you’ve been there before, knowing you’ve overcome it before, and knowing exactly how to do it again.

Moses found that out the hard way. A decade after winning Olympic bronze, Filip Hrgović showed the value of taking the hard road to success. When the pressure came, he remained composed, focused and committed to his objective. Eventually, Moses wilted and fell.

Is it time for a change in Moses’ career? Potentially. But that depends on how badly he wants to become great.

Because Filip Hrgović is proof of what happens when you don’t just wait for success, you actively chase it.

Will Claressa Shields ever get the test her career deserves? Will she ever get the test that cements her greatness?

It seems that she’s so far ahead of everybody else in boxing that she could almost retire, Go and do the Olympics with a third gold medal, come back and be undisputed all over again and if that is the case, what does that say about the quality of women’s Boxing overall?

BEYOND BOXING EP311 - ONE FOR THE DIPSH*TS by Highfield Boxing

For over a decade, boxing fans have waited for Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury to finally meet. In heavyweight boxing, 10 years is an eternity. It’s the difference between your prime and your decline.

Fast forward to 2026, and last weekend made one thing painfully clear: both men are in rapid decline. Neither looks capable of competing with the elite anymore. At this stage, it feels as though they’re both searching for one final payday before walking away.

The biggest irony? I don’t think the Joshua–Fury fight happens at all.

What a career Errol Spence Jr. has had.

When history judges him, I think he’ll be remembered as one of the rare elite fighters who took on every challenge. No ducking, no waiting for opponents to age, no protecting an unbeaten record. He fought virtually everyone there was to fight at welterweight, and fought almost all of them in or around their prime.

Changing the manager will not fix anything. The England football problems are the same as the British boxing problems.

We have a society that are not mentally resilient but what is even worse is that we have very few, if any internal drivers to be great collectively.

How do we fix this?

Boxing loves to shoot itself in the foot. How can we go from Jaron Ennis and Xander Zayas giving us one of the best fights we’ve seen in the last 10 years to having to deal with Tyson Fury fighting Mariusz Wach.

With him then offering his fig leaf of charitable donations when he could easily cover the charitable donation on his own, But once again, he just wants to milk the fans for what he can.

I guess this is kind of Boxing’s version of the sublime they’re ridiculous