Sutherland will be on flight for Chicago

DARREN SUTHERLAND will be on the flight when the Irish boxing team leave Dublin on October 16 for the world championships in Chicago.

The two-time national senior middleweight champion, and a current EU champion, caused a scare when he suffered a facial injury during sparring at the training camp in Fontainebleau last week.

“I got a bit of a cut in training, but luckily it is not as serious as initially thought,” he said yesterday as the 13-strong squad went through their paces before returning to Dublin later today.

All the members of the Irish world championship team have been training with their French counterparts for the past week and, according to Sutherland, it has been excellent.

“I have had a really good week’s training,” he said. “The whole squad is very fit and we are looking forward to the world championships.”

They were joined in Fontainebleau by featherweight Carl Frampton and Sutherland’s understudy, Kilkenny middleweight Darren O’Neill, who will both box in Cyprus next month.

The squad will train collectively with the Germans at their base in Frankfurt before departing for Chicago where Olympic qualification beckons for the top four boxers in each division.

Darren Sutherland, ranked in the top 10 amateur middleweights in the world, is among the Irish boxers tipped for possible qualification.

European bronze medallist Kenneth Egan, who also won an EU title in Dublin last June, is another who can get an automatic qualification spot while another EU champion, Athy welterweight Roy Sheahan, is also tipped.

Sheahan sustained a hand injury at the multi-nations tournament in the Ukraine during the summer, but was completely recovered in time to resume full sparring in France.

And the 11-man team bound for Chicago is littered with possibilities with young guns like David Oliver Joyce, who missed the EU championships with a hand injury, and his cousin, John Joe, all showing promise.

Performance director Gary Keegan was back in Ireland last evening finalising arrangements for the training camp in Frankfurt.

“We had a very good training camp in France,” he said. “Darren caused a bit of a scare, but it turned out to be nothing more than a small nick over a cheek bone which required just two stitches. We don’t know exactly how it happened, because he was wearing head gear with a facial protector at the time. He banged his man and it just happened. With Darren it was not a major concern if he had to miss some sparring, because he has had a lot of boxing this year and did not need the same level of sparring as the other members of the team.”

They will train in Frankfurt until October 12 and then leave for Chicago four days later. Darren O’Neill and Carl Frampton will also travel to Germany and then head for the big multi-nations tournament in Cyprus.

“We have two top class boxers there — Darren is ranked in the top 10 in Europe — so it is very important that we keep them busy,” Gary Keegan said.