Great Britain's best boxing year ever!

[superheavyrhun]

Okay thanks amateur so world champs don't count as World champs what was Hatton then between the years of 2001-2004.

A fringe title holder with World Title potential. You can try to sell it anyway you want (see threads about Antonio Tarver's IBO title challenge) but if it's not one of the big four, it's not really recognised.

John Simpson then

HAHAHAHAHAHA You got me !!! Sorry Simpson, i just dont rate Matthews, i think Simpson would beat him in a re match.

Totally agree, I thought that Simpson really pushed Matthews and if the ref was keeping a proper eye on Matthews he'd have lost a point or two for sure. And as it was in Matthews' back yard he got a generous shake of the scores as well. Matthews' gutter boxing style grates with me, same as Bernard Hopkins' does.

Chech this out I've been doing research.

Someone at the boxrec forum has calculated the average rank of world title fight losers in 2006.

This is working on the theory that the higher the rank of the title loser, the more credible and competativeness etc. of the fights.

And the results were:

IBF: 10.47 (from 13.51)
WBC: 10.86 (from 9.83)
IBO: 11.15 (from 23.26)
WBO: 16.32 (from 17.11)
WBA: 28.57 (from 17.02)

EBU: 51.12 (from 34.4)
Commonwealth: 51.55 (from 62.10) !!!

Champs Like Wladimir Klitschko, Antonio Tarver, Tomasz Adamek and Ricky Hatton all hold IBO World Champion belts and this shows that the IBO is on the way up.

http://www.boxrec.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=49667

Being a bit of a statto myself, I have to say there is a rather big flaw in this logic, because by calculating the ranking of the loser of the fight, it will always mean that the title holder, should he lose, is counted as 1, thus to be at the top of this calculation, all a boxing organisation has to do is to have the champions lose most often.

Basically, this table is slanted towards making boxing organisation with the more beatable champions more competitive with the big four. Another thing which will make it difficult is that if an organisation has an "avoided" champion, it will mean that fighters lower in the rankings will step up to the plate, because higher ranked fighters are chasing other champions.

As was suggested in the thread itself, this would have a lot more credibility if it had calculated the average rank of the challengers, rather than the losers of title fights.