Britain’s Josh Kelly put on a slick and brave performance to beat Bakhram Murtazaliev and win the IBF light-middleweight title by majority decision in Newcastle.<\/p>\n
It was a trademark Kelly display as he danced around the ring, displaying devastating speed and high ring IQ – knowing when to engage and when to get on his heels.<\/p>\n
Both fighters hit the canvas with Murtazaliev going down in the fourth and Kelly in the ninth. The Briton went down a further two times late in the fight, but both were ruled as slips.<\/p>\n
Two judges scored the bout 115-111 and 114-113 in Kelly’s favour with the other having it down as a 113-113 draw. <\/p>\n
Murtazaliev looked to have got to grips with Kelly’s evasive style in the latter rounds, but the home fighter rallied in the last three minutes to end strongly.<\/p>\n
Kelly, who becomes Sunderland’s first world champion, sprinted to embrace trainer Adam Booth when the result was announced before grabbing the belt and raising it up to the 4,000-strong crowd.<\/p>\n
“It feels like a dream. I envisioned this,” Kelly told BBC Radio 5 Live.<\/p>\n
“I was praying a couple of days ago, envisioned the fight, and I had deja vu of the knockdown in the tenth round.<\/p>\n
“I had to concentrate – I feel overwhelmed. I need to take a second backstage to gather myself. I’m mentally exhausted.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain’s Josh Kelly put on a slick and brave performance to beat Bakhram Murtazaliev and win the IBF…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":401662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-401661","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401661","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=401661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/401662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}