You don’t win a fight against Naoya Inoue. You merely survive. From the beginning of this undisputed bantamweight championship fight from Tokyo, it was apparent Paul Butler was mainly concerned with doing the latter.
You can’t really blame the Ellesmere Port native, even if he did come in as the WBO bantamweight champion. Far more accomplished competitors than the Brit have found themselves caught in the clutches of ‘The Monster’. But, considering he was a champion going in and this was a chance at undisputed glory, it was frustrating to see Butler seemingly intent on just staying in the ring as long as possible.
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It took until the eleventh round for Inoue to find the knockout blow. ‘Kaibutsu’ usually accomplishes the feat much sooner. Nobody had taken him past the eighth round for three years going into this bout. But in the penultimate round, a brutal body shot followed by a sustained volley of shots to the head got him the well-deserved knockout.
Inoue deserved his win. He deserves the four belts that go with it. But there is something else that the Japanese star deserves that he is yet to receive. That is the widespread attention and adulation his skills and accomplishments merit.
This has long been the plight of the lower-weight boxer. Imagine a boxer between heavyweight and middleweight being 24-0 with 21 knockouts, fighting a crowd-pleasing style and taking on all-comers like Inoue has? He has competed in Fight of the Year battles, scored dramatic quick KOs in 50-50 fights and has held world titles since 2014. All this by the age of 29. Inoue should be the most talked about fighter in the game.
Instead, fans from Butler’s native United Kingdom could not even watch the fight through official channels. While Britain is served with boxing across multiple channels, the fight was nowhere to be seen. A British fighter against a pound-for-pound great for the undisputed title should be an easy sell. Top Rank Boxing have a deal with Sky Sports in the country, but the fight remained absent from domestic screens.
The same would never happen with Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, Devin Haney or Artur Beterbiev. Even without British interest, each of those men has had their most recent fights screened in the UK. Inoue sits on the pound-for-pound list amongst those fighters. But still this generational talent was kept cloaked from us, even while pounding one of our own.
The Butler fight is unlikely to live long in the memory. The same would be true if we had been able to watch it. This bantamweight title collision was too one-sided to linger. But it is to be hoped that Inoue is not hidden from our eyes again. The UK is a boxing hotbed and, with so many channels broadcasting the sport here, it is simply unacceptable that one of the greatest fighters on the planet is made to toil in international obscurity.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject To Change
