stop him in the 10th round<\/a> in December.<\/p>\nThe English pair put on another thrilling contest in Leeds which the judges scored 116-112, 117-112 and 115-113 in Simpson’s favour.<\/p>\n
The 29-year-old, fighting under new trainer Rob McCracken, rocked Williamson with a big right hand in the third round.<\/p>\n
But Williamson, 34, hung in and stung the challenger in the eighth round. Then, knowing he needed a knockout, he took the fight to Simpson in the final round.<\/p>\n
However, that late rally was not enough to stop Yorkshire’s Simpson improving his professional record to 19 wins and one loss.<\/p>\n
“It feels amazing,” said Simpson. “I really didn’t want it to be that exciting, but Troy is a tough fighter. He won the last fight so he [had] every right to be confident.<\/p>\n
“What everyone doesn’t know is that, in the last fight, I perforated both my eardrums in the first round. I was an absolute mess so that fight for me was just trying to survive.<\/p>\n
“But I didn’t make any excuses. I’ve come back better, learned from it and I knew I was going to get the win tonight.”<\/p>\n
Simpson’s promoter Ben Shalom said the fight was “unbelievable” and praised Williamson, now 22-5 with one draw, as he “kept coming”.<\/p>\n
But Shalom feels Simpson is back in world-title contention and hopes to secure him a shot in the next 12 months.<\/p>\n
“In boxing, people are so quick to write someone off,” he added. “The amount of people that told me ‘do not take that rematch’.<\/p>\n
“We took it, [Simpson] did it and I’m so happy for him.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Callum Simpson reclaimed the British and Commonwealth super-middleweight titles after earning a unanimous decision in his rematch with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-732000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732000","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=732000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}