Walsh sets the bar high for Irish team ahead of Worlds

IRELAND will win one medal and qualify three boxers for London 2012 if targets set in advance of the World Championships in Baku are met.

High Performance Coach, Billy Walsh, assembled his troops at the High Performance Unit on South Circular Road yesterday — 10 in all — and insisted each one of them has the potential to qualify for next year’s Olympic Games.

“We set a target at the beginning of the year that we’d qualify five boxers for London 2012 and at the World Championships we’d hope to qualify three and win one medal,” he said.

“Of course I’d be very happy to exceed that and we have possibilities of exceeding that. If you look at the last three world championships we have had around three lads in the top eight — that’s where we’ve ended up and that’s what will qualify us.

“Qualification is more difficult than the Olympics itself — the European championships are harder than the Olympic Games because that’s the hotbed of amateur boxing is in Europe.

“There is room in the world championships for an easier draw but then there are 720 boxers so you may have to fight five times in a week to get to the top eight and that’ll take it’s toll because no matter how bad or how good you are you will get hit, hurt, injured. You have to maintain your focus and your weight over that period of time and your performance over that period of time.”

Ireland will travel to the world championships with five boxers in the top 10 in the world, European champions Joe Ward and Ray Moylette and then Darren O’Neill, John Joe Nevi and Olympic bronze medallist Paddy Barnes.

Just outside of that they have Willie McLaughlin and Ryan Burnett who are 11th in their respective weights with Olympic silver medallist, Kenny Egan, because he moved to a new weight division ranked 13th on the heavyweight list. To highlight all that, Katie Taylor has been at No 1 for the last five years.

“If we get the seeding that we are expecting to get — if those five lads get into the top eight — they will be kept away from the other top seven until they qualify but we don’t have any word on that yet,” Walsh said.

“This team is better than the team that went to Beijing and that’s not just because of the rankings. Look at the record — three European champions, two world champions, two Olympic medallists — we did not have that going to Beijing and the record speaks for itself. This is the first time we have had a team of 10 all of whom are capable of qualifying for the Olympic Games.”

At the world championships in Chicago a new star emerged in the unlikely form of Belfast light flyweight, Paddy Barnes, who was a late addition to the team and became the first Irishman to qualify for the Beijing Olympics.

And Walsh feels that another Belfast youngster could steal the show in Baku with the 19-year-old flyweight heading into the tournament as an unknown quantity.

“He has been the outstanding newcomer this year,” Billy Walsh said. “When he came into the programme there were no expectations — he was only a kid coming into the team for the first time — and he went out and won a couple of gold medals. He beat the world silver medallist and he beat the European medallist on his way to nearly winning a medal at the European championships.

On Sunday they leave for a training camp outside Cologne. There they will spar with Moldova, Romania, Germany and Holland.

“We will have a variety of sparring partners deep in the forest, away from everybody, no distractions,” Billy Walsh said. “We fly from Germany to Baku on September 21 with the weigh-in on September 25.”