Barnes and Donovan add to Ireland’s Euro medals haul
Yesterday was another red letter day for Irish boxing with just one blip – hot favourite John Joe Nevin losing by the unbelievable margin of 7-1 to English bantamweight, Gamal Yafai, despite battering him with everything in his armoury.
The biggest performance of the day at the Ice Palace came from Eric Donovan, who scored with accurate jabs and put the perfect combinations together to leave the judges with no option but push the blue button.
At the end of it all Donovan beat Miklos Vargo of Hungary 10-4. When the pair met at the World Championships in Chicago, Donovan won an enthralling contest 36-22.
“I was pretty confident going into today’s fight because I had beaten him in Chicago,” said Donovan. “That just gave me the edge over him today. I knew he beat the double Olympic champion in Turkey a few weeks ago so I was up against it.
“Two years ago I wasn’t even senior champion but I knuckled down, I worked hard. I never stopped believing in myself and Billy (Walsh) and Zaur (Antia) drove me on. They knew what tactics we needed to adopt to beat this guy today and we stuck to them and thankfully it worked.
“I am in against the Russian, Albert Selimov, in the semi-finals. He won a world title in Chicago and when we boxed before he beat me 6-0. That score certainly did not reflect my performance in the fight and I am looking forward to putting the record straight on Friday. I feel my best is yet to come here.”
Paddy Barnes, too, was over the moon with a European medal to add to his Olympic bronze, thanks to an emphatic 8-1 victory over English light flyweight, Thomas Stubbs.
“It’s what I came out here for and I got it,” said Barnes. “Before the Olympic Games came into the picture I always dreamed about a European medal and now I have a bronze medal and I want to do better.
“I felt I was always in control of the fight today. Things were going extremely well all the time and I was catching him with some really good shots.”
Irish head coach Billy Walsh insisted the performances to date have exceeded all expectations.
“Five bronze medals is just fantastic – probably more than we ever could have expected,” he said. “These are very, very tough tournaments. We won three medals at the last Europeans in Liverpool, we had one each time before that and the championships before that again 10 guys went out and they were all beaten in the first round.
“It is a very tough and hostile environment. I am absolutely thrilled. The performances of the team are outstanding and they are growing in confidence.
“When we started the (High Performance) programme it took us a few years but from 2006 onwards the medals started to come in. We were there for three years before that but the belief really started to kick in that year.
“How we developed that was by bringing the boxers to the hostile environments, putting them into the hotbeds of boxing and training with those guys and showing them that we are as good as they are.
“Our boys believed that our system is better than what they have. Now the new kids coming into the High Performance don’t know any different.”
Team captain Kenneth Egan can’t wait to exact revenge when he renews rivalry with Abdlekader Bouhenia (France) in tomorrow’s semi-finals. When they met at the World Championships in Milan last year, Bouhenia won 17-9.
“I’ll just take it one fight at a time as I did in the Olympics,” he said. “I had a bad year last year – personal problems and all that – but that’s all behind me. I am back with the team I love, the team I trust.
“The team we have now are absolutely fantastic. It is nice to be winning medals in front of those guys – these young lads – because they look up to me. To win five medals is a great achievement in itself.”
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