Royston Barney-Smith said that he “needed to step up to another gear” for Saturday’s win against Danny Quartermaine. <\/p>\n
“Sugar Boy Roy” outclassed his opponent at the O2 Arena on the way to a unanimous decision, claiming the WBO and IBF European super-featherweight belts.<\/p>\n
At 21, Barney-Smith remains unbeaten with 15 wins to his name.<\/p>\n
“It’s a big win and I’m really happy with the performance,” he told BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“It meant a lot to me after an injury and some time out the gym this year, I just knew I had to step everything up to another gear and I did that.<\/p>\n
“Every round I was hurting him so I just knew it was going to be a matter of time before I took him out, I knew I was capable of winning this fight and I did that but It was lingering on my mind.” <\/p>\n
This fight was originally scheduled to take place earlier in the year on the south coast in Bournemouth. <\/p>\n
But Southampton’s Barney-Smith had to pull out of the contest after suffering a knee injury weeks before the event. <\/p>\n
Throughout the contest he looked the superior operator, landing clean strikes as Quartermaine tried to make the bout awkward later on with erratic flurries forward.<\/p>\n
Southpaw Barney-Smith – who is trained by Ben Davison – hurt his opponent on a couple of occasions before dropping him in the 10th and final round with a sweet short right hand.<\/p>\n
Quartermaine was a fighter the young talent had suggested to promoter Frank Warren as someone he wanted to test himself against. <\/p>\n
“I needed to have a breakthrough fight,” Barney-Smith added.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been screaming for one for the last year and I finally had my chance so I took it with both hands.<\/p>\n
“I don’t want to keep fighting journeymen who keep running away from me, I want to fight a live opponent and land some big shots and that is what I did tonight.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Royston Barney-Smith said that he “needed to step up to another gear” for Saturday’s win against Danny Quartermaine.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":228469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-228468","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/228469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}