Boxing In Britain: Eames And Earl Reunite At York Hall

Former WBU Champion, turned boxing promoter, Graham Earl and his former coach Johnny Eames have rekindled a working partnership, which spanned more than six years as fighter-trainer team, and as a result there are no less than four of Johnny’s Ultrachem TKO Gym trained fighters appearing at Graham’s upcoming ‘Capital Punishment’ event this coming Saturday at York Hall in Bethnal Green, London.

During their time together Johnny guided Graham to virtually every domestic title – Southern Area, British and Commonwealth – as well as the WBU World Lightweight Crown. Now with Graham as a promoter, Johnny is looking forward to working with Graham again, albeit in the revised roles of promoter-manager.

On Saturday night Johnny will have four of his youngsters supporting the headliner, the Southern Area Super Middleweight title clash between Portsmouth’s Paul Morby and Essex’s Daniel ‘The Slick’ Cadman.

Amongst these will be the exciting Dutch Cruiserweight prospect Mitchell Balker, who will be having his London debut, as will Ultrachem TKO’s latest addition, Dollis Hill based American Super Middleweight Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Oshunrinde. Whilst the Surrey based duo Danny ‘Cassius’ Connor and ‘Dynamo’ Daryl Setterfield will be getting their first outing of 2011.

Johnny took a little time off, between training his current crop of prospects, to talk about Graham and the Ultrachem TKO fighters who will be appearing this Saturday at ‘Capital Punishment’.

“It’s a pleasure to be working with Graham Earl, said the no nonsense Johnny Eames, “we worked together for a lot of years in the pros, six and half in fact and had some great years as a fighter/trainer and hopefully we’ll have a lot of good years together with him working as a promoter and us supplying some of the fighters.

It’s good to have new promoters on the block for people like myself who’s got a busy gym and a lot of the fighters are not with the big promoters. So people like Graham coming along is a breath of fresh air for the sport.”

Johnny then turned his attention to the four TKO trained boxers on Graham’s show, “With the help of our TKO Box Office website, which Rio (Publicist Gianluca (Rio) Di Caro) and myself put together some months ago, we are able to get people like Mitchell Balker, who’s a raw talent and coming along really nicely, enables us the chance to get them on as house fighters instead of being an opponent all the time.

He deserves his chance of being a house fighter. he’s a very dedicated boy, he never misses training and even when he has been ill I have had to make him take time off out of the gym to prepare himself properly. The kid deserves success and hopefully our TKO Box Office website will help the kid to get that success.

This is his first opportunity of being the house fighter going in against ‘The Ox’, Nick Okoth, and I’m pretty certain, as certain as I can be, that Mitchell will get his first win on British soil. Moving on to Daryl Setterfield, who is taking on Jay Morris. Jay is a win some, lose some type of fighter like Daryl, and is expected to win. I’m 99% certain that if Daryl boxes to his capabilities he can upset the apple cart.

Onto young Danny (Danny ‘Cassius’ Connor), Danny’s boxing one of Graham Earl’s favourite boys, Terry Holmes, who’s had one and won it, beat Johnny Greaves. Again Danny’s got all the capabilities to beat young Terry.

I’m pretty certain it will be an entertaining fight for the crowd with a come forward fighter against a back foot boxer. Who knows anything can happen and I wouldn’t be surprised if Danny picks up his first win, although It’ll be a very, very tight one if he does.

Then we’ve got Manny (Emmanuel ‘Manny’ Oshunrinde), he’s not actually managed by the TKO, he’s managed by Graham Earl and is trained by Barry Smith at our gym. Graham asked Barry to train Manny for him. Barry has only had him for two weeks and hasn’t really been able to do a lot with him.

The benefit that Manny has had since he’s been coming to the TKO gym is he’s sparred every day whereas in the past he’s really had no sparring at all. Hopefully we’ll see a vast improvement from his first fight. Apparently he was winning until he ran out of steam. While Barry’s two weeks haven’t been able to have done much, we’ll see if the two weeks has improved him in that sense.

We’re all looking forward to a good night and wish Graham all the success.”

Tickets for the Graham Earl promoted Capital Punishment, headlined by Paul Morby versus Daniel ‘The Slick’ Cadman Southern Area Super Middleweight title clash at York Hall, Bethnal Green in London on Saturday 22nd January 2011 are priced £35 (unreserved) and £50 (ringside) and are available on-line at www.tkoboxoffice.com – or for further information call 07960 850645.