Katie Taylor overcame a tricky clash last night with Jessica McCaskill as she made her first successful defence of her WBA lightweight title. After the fight, Tony Bellew was ringside giving his thoughts on the Bray native's performance, saying that she will have learned a valuable lesson from a very physical bout:
You can see when she chooses to box and move, she's levels ahead of everybody. But for me, that wasn't a hard boxing match for her, that was very hard physically.
The Liverpool cruiserweight made the point that Taylor would not have had much experience with scrappy fights coming from the amateur scene:
That girl made it rough, she was ready, she wrestled, she made it messy and that's something Katie Taylor has never experienced, because in amateur boxing immediately as soon as you get close - it's break.
Bellew reiterated that Taylor's boxing skills are streets ahead of her competitors but also warned that she needs to work on the cruder aspects of the sport:
Katie Taylor does not need to have them stand off wars, wrestling fights, making fights really hard. She just needs to box. She's levels ahead of anybody else in her field when it comes to the boxing, but tonight she will have learned a lesson, she's going to have to start getting a little more physical with people learning to tie them up the right way. It's the little tricks of the trade that you will learn with experience.
Here's the analysis in full:
