Carl Frampton counting the cost of Las Vegas gamble

Sunday dawns slow in Las Vegas. As Carl Frampton hauled himself out of bed in his private loft at the MGM Grand yesterday, the morning after the night before would have brought only light relief.

The Belfast featherweight had started his first ever headline fight week here by saying he felt “out of place2 amid the faux-grandiose fittings of the strip. On Saturday night at the megacasino’s Garden Arena, however, he again proved he fits right in on the most blisteringly brilliant fighting nights at the Mecca of boxing. It’s just that Leo Santa Cruz fits even better.

Losing the first fight of your professional life is a jarring, humbling experience, even for this most humble of competitors. Losing his WBA world title at the first time of asking so soon after being almost unanimously crowned as the fighter of last year hurt, hurt more than any of the stinging Santa Cruz jabs that had kept Belfast’s tiger at bay.

“I am a winner, I want to win all the time,” Frampton said after the 24th fight of his professional career ended the opposite way to all previous 23. “I come away for a long time from my family. I don’t see my kids for a long time and want to win for my kids. I am extremely disappointed.”

In the ring in the moments after the judges’ refreshingly spot-on decision had been read out and sent swells of Mexican support wild, Frampton had felt the need to apologise to his own travelling fans, whose numbers had hit upwards of 5,000.

He spent part of Sunday opening up a tab and mingling with his footsoldiers in an Irish bar at the New York New York casino. How different it all felt to the real world Big Apple just six months ago when Sunday had been a day of drinking in the most glorious night of his life.

There is, of course, perspective to be found in close confines. A Las Vegas title defence went wrong against a fighting Cruz, but this was a world removed from the career-shuddering halt that his mentor had suffered here three decades ago.

“Don’t start that. It’s completely different,” said Barry McGuigan, when inevitably asked about parallels between mentor and protege. “All the way through my career people said, ‘don’t go to Manchester. You lost the last fight of your career in Manchester, don’t do that’. It’s all nonsense. This kid is his own individual. He’s his own man, a very special kid and a very special talent. He lost by very little.

“I’m no longer a fighter but I feel the pain for him because he’s very close to me and it’s our first defeat. It’s terrible. What do you say? It’ll be all right? Of course it won’t be fucking all right. He lost it, it feels bad.”

It was Santa Cruz, stung so badly by his own first career defeat in their first meeting, who had got on all right on their second date inside the ropes. The Mexican made his name as a frenetic, frenzied, aggressor who would unleash hell on rivals. If not reinvented, he was at the very least retooled here. The full influence of his father and trainer Jose Sr — six months ago crippled by a cancer that is now in remission — came to bear early and often on another bewitching battle.

Santa Cruz was so steady, setting a slower pace and frustrating Frampton by utilising his reach and height advantage, that punishing jab too. The most frustrating aspect for the Belfast man was he and trainer Shane McGuigan had been warned it would be so — by Santa Cruz himself.

“He told me what he was going to do. He told me he would use his distance. I thought he was bluffing,” said Frampton, the efficiency and fluid rhythm of that Barclays Center triumph having largely deserted him once he found himself in an early hole. “I thought he was going to come out and go head first.”

As the Jackal retreats home to lick the deepest wounds he’s known, he’s offered to get the spare room ready for a summer arrival, so desperate is he to fight on home soil next time out.

“He can come and stay in my house if he wants... and we can get it on for a third time. After that, I would be happy to go to LA. Who knows? This could be three, four, five.”