Castlebar Boxing Club\u2019s Natalia Fascizewska will fight for gold on Saturday at the European Under-23 Boxing Championships in Budapest after a stunning semi-final victory.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s now guaranteed at least a silver medal, while five other Irish boxers have earned bronze medals at the competition.<\/p>\n
The Mayo southpaw defeated Georgia\u2019s Khuraman Kasumova after the referee stopped their 57kg semi-final in the second round.<\/p>\n
The first round started cagily, but as Kasumova tried to chase Fascizewska, the Irish fighter began landing sharp punches and gaining confidence.<\/p>\n
The gap widened further in the second round, where Fascizewska consistently found a home for her straight left hand, forcing the referee to issue the Georgian three standing counts.<\/p>\n
The fight was stopped with a minute remaining in the round, seeing Fascizewska through to Saturday\u2019s final.<\/p>\n
Also in action for Ireland on Friday, Louis Rooney lost out by stoppage in the 50kg semi-final against Azerbaijan\u2019s Subhan Mamedov.<\/p>\n
The first round was closely fought, with both boxers landing clean combinations and showing a high level of skill, but Mamedov claimed the session on four scorecards.<\/p>\n
The Azerbaijani fighter repeated that feat in the second round despite being rocked back by a straight right from the Belfast man with a minute to go.<\/p>\n
However, the final round was definitive for Mamedov. Rooney suffered a point deduction, and was knocked down by a stiff counter punch as he went in search of a miracle to fight his way back into contention.<\/p>\n
But he was stopped with 30 seconds left of the fight, taking home a bronze medal for his efforts.<\/p>\n
The Irish team has secured six medals across the tournament, with Cliona D\u2019Arcy, Ava Henry, Tiffany Spencer and Rebecca Kavanagh also claiming bronze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Castlebar Boxing Club\u2019s Natalia Fascizewska will fight for gold on Saturday at the European Under-23 Boxing Championships in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,139509,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-312919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-general-view","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}