AFTER A BANNER 2024, FEATHERWEIGHT TITLEHOLDER NICK BALL – A PRODUCT OF LIVERPOOL’S MOST RESPECTED GYM – IS POISED FOR AN EVEN GREATER 2025 By John Evans BUILT FOR BATTLE
I t is a cold Friday morning in Liverpool, and one by one, the fighters file into the city’s famous old Everton Red Triangle gym to finish off their first week’s work of 2025. They talk as they change into their training gear and make their way to an office where head trainer Paul Stevenson has a fight cued up on the computer. Today’s viewing is the exciting lightweight rematch between Edwin Rosario and Jose Luis Ramirez from 1984. Once everybody has taken their seats, he hits play. The gym is home to a number of established championship- level fighters, but although British and Commonwealth 118-pound titleholder Andrew Cain and junior featherweight up-and-comer Brad Strand chip in with the occasional thought or comment, they remain glued to the screen as Stevenson talks them through the action. WBA featherweight titleholder Nick Ball sits quietly, watching the fight and wrapping his hands. Once Ramirez has completed his unlikely comeback and snatched away Rosario’s WBC title, the fighters make their way back into the gym to get ready for the morning’s session.
“Every day we get in at 10 and watch the old fights. All different ones. We do that ’til 11 a.m., when we start training,” Ball said. “My favorite? We watch all different fighters. We’ve watched that many and we have different opinions on them but, overall, probably Mike Tyson for me. He’s just got that style. “Paul might be showing us what one fighter’s doing in the ring with one shot, and then you go and do it on the bag. You might focus on just that one shot or all different things. That’s the idea of it, really. To watch it and then take it into training and use it in our own way and the way Paul shows us.” “I’ll pick quite specific ones for certain things,” said Stevenson. “You can look at one fight through a load of different lenses. Whether you’re looking at it from the perspective of a challenger or an orthodox fighter or a tall fighter or whatever it is. That’s just where I come in to get my points across to the boxers. It’s hard to just tell you one thing, because it’s very rich and varied what we do, but I believe in spending 25, 30 minutes each day [watching fights]. We might watch a fight over a week,
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