Warburton, from Colwyn Bay, described his win over Heaney at Manchester’s Co-Op Live Arena in March as “surreal”.<\/p>\n
He fought before a crowd of 15,000, which included over 2,000 of Heaney’s supporters from Stoke-on-Trent, on that triumphant night.<\/p>\n
“There was a lot of pressure on me to win the fight – I don’t know where I’d have gone if I’d have lost it,” Warburton said.<\/p>\n
“But I took the opportunity with both hands, dealt with everything in the best possible way I could and got the job done.<\/p>\n
“People didn’t expect me to perform the way that I did.<\/p>\n
“But my management, my team around me, they all believe in me and they know what I’m capable of. On the night I showed it.”<\/p>\n
With no rematch clause stipulated in the deal struck for Warburton’s previous meeting with Heaney, the southpaw boxer had eyes on other prizes.<\/p>\n
But one phone call altered the Welshman’s plans, and left him with an easy decision.<\/p>\n
“We were looking at maybe taking the next step ahead, maybe potentially fighting for another title or something like that,” Warburton explained.<\/p>\n
“We had a few opportunities that we turned down. We weren’t in any rush.<\/p>\n
“Then we got a phone call to say that Nathan Heaney said that he wants his last fight to be against you. Would you take it?<\/p>\n
“We just said yes straight away. It’s just an opportunity that you can’t turn down, so we took it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warburton, from Colwyn Bay, described his win over Heaney at Manchester’s Co-Op Live Arena in March as “surreal”.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":906621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[571],"tags":[64,63,802,85],"class_list":["post-906620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boxing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/906621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}