Fight week was dominated by predictions that Buatsi, five years Hutchinson’s senior, is over the hill.<\/p>\n
And the Londoner did nothing to prove otherwise as Hutchinson often toyed with his opponent in the centre of the ring.<\/p>\n
The first fight in 2024 had Buatsi walking to the ring as a comfortable favourite, and he backed that up with crushing body shots to send Hutchinson tumbling twice.<\/p>\n
But this time around, Hutchinson was a different fighter. In his own words, he had “matured” after picking up two wins since last facing Buatsi.<\/p>\n
Hutchinson clearly had the crowd on his side as he made the walk to cheers, while Buatsi was met by a chorus of boos as he paraded around the ring before the bell.<\/p>\n
For Buatsi, the strategy was very much the same as the first encounter – whip shots into the body – but Hutchinson now had answers.<\/p>\n
The AO Arena is famous for its boxing nights with the city’s favourite boxing son, Ricky Hatton, becoming world champion here for the first time in June 2005 in a thriller against Kostya Tszyu.<\/p>\n
This did not reach those heights, as the upper tier was closed off because of a lack of ticket sales – and fans of Manchester’s Jack Rafferty departed after he won the co-main event.<\/p>\n
This did not deter Hutchinson from advancing in the latter rounds and landing rapid triple jabs, while also switching stances.<\/p>\n
As Manchester royalty Bez, of the Happy Mondays, watched on from ringside, Hutchinson’s corner told him “three rounds and you’re a world champion” after the ninth.<\/p>\n
And they were right. Despite Buatsi’s advances late on, Hutchinson held out to become world champion for the first time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fight week was dominated by predictions that Buatsi, five years Hutchinson’s senior, is over the hill. And the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-678200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}