Katie faces familiar foe with titles on the line

Katie Taylor following her Undisputed Female Lightweight Championship bout victory over Miriam Gutierrez at SSE Wembley Arena last November. Photo: Mark Robinson/Sportsfile

Sean McGoldrick

April 25 2021 02:30 AM

Nearly nine years after they came face to face in the quarter-final of the Olympics Games in London, Katie Taylor and Natasha Jonas will trade leather again in the Manchester Arena next Saturday night.

In 2012 an Olympic bronze medal was the prize on offer. This time around Taylor’s status as undefeated World Lightweight champion is on the line as she defends her WBA, IBF, WBC, and WBA belts against the Liverpudlian southpaw.

The fight marks a watershed in Taylor’s career for two reasons. It will almost certainly be the last Taylor fight to be shown on Sky Sports, the TV network which — together with her promoters Matchroom — took a punt on her when she turned pro in 2016.

While it hasn’t been formally announced, it has been widely reported that Matchroom are on the brink of signing a new multi-million dollar TV deal with the worldwide streaming service DAZN.

Taylor’s world championship fights are already streamed in the US and elsewhere on the network with Sky retaining the TV rights for the UK and Ireland. But all will change once the new deal is inked.

It will boost Taylor’s earnings and the chances are that her first exclusive fight on DAZN will be a showdown against nine-weight world champion Amanda Serrano. This of course depends on Taylor beating Jonas, who retired from boxing in 2015 before reversing her decision and turning professional in 2017.

In Ireland there will be a degree of notoriety about the contest as it is the first time that Taylor will share a ring with a boxer managed by the controversial MTK organisation. But as Matchroom boss Eddie Hearn alluded to recently, the undefeated Taylor is prepared to take on all-comers.

“Katie Taylor has never turned down an opponent. Sometimes you get a situation in British, Irish, domestic fights, whatever you want to call them, that people say, ‘Oh no, I’m not fighting her’. Katie is just like, ‘That’s a great fight. That’s a great fight for women’s boxing. That’s a great fight for the fans. Let’s do it’.”

Once Jonas opted to turn pro, a reprise of her classic 2012 Olympic showdown against Taylor was on the cards. But in her seventh fight Jonas suffered a shock loss to Viviane Obenauf. She won her next three fights, however, before drawing with WBC super featherweight champion Terri Harper last summer. But in the view of most observers Jonas shaded the contest.

She has a height advantage over Taylor and has a more powerful punch, but the Irish fighter is a more seasoned professional, having fought 134 rounds compared to Jonas’ 49.