Unbeaten Brook back with a bang

Unbeaten Steel City welterweight Brook moves to 24-0 but was unable to extend a run of eight wins inside the distance against wily veteran N’Dou (48-13-2), who is yet to be stopped in an 18-year professional career.

Brook, 25, fighting in his home city for the first time in six years, survived some brief early scares to comprehensively outclass the former IBF light-welterweight title champion by scores of 119-110 (twice) and 118-111 on the judges’ scorecards.

Victory secured Brook the vacant WBA Inter-Continental belt, but his attentions will now turn towards the welterweight division’s major prizes.

In the opener N’Dou set his stall out by loading up on three left hooks. All missed their target though as Brook exhibited the crisper work.

N’Dou’s physicality allowed him to shade the second round, but Brook regrouped to land with greater consistency in the third and his sharp combinations illuminated the early stages of the fourth.

However, he was displaying a willingness to engage in N’Dou’s kind of fight and a thumping left shipped at the start of round five served as a cautionary tale.

Brook finally heeded trainer Dominic Ingle’s pleas to return to the jab and controlled the remainder of the round, before the left lead teed up his most enterprising session in the sixth.

Crackerjack right hands behind Brook’s smooth range-finder had N’Dou reeling back towards the ropes, the South African looking every one of his 39 years.

Despite occasional dalliances with trench warfare, Brook’s superiority was firmly established through rounds seven and eight.

By the ninth Brook was skipping effervescently round his foe and landing from all angles, but N’Dou came back to land some chopping hooks to the chin on the inside.

Nevertheless, such moments of defiance were becoming all the more infrequent and a beautiful right-uppercut in the 10th from Brook had the home fighter sensing a finish.

Ultimately though, N’Dou’s famed survival instincts kicked in down the stretch as wave after waves of punishing Brook attacks were absorbed for him to reach the final bell.

After being taken past seven rounds for the first time in his professional career, Brook was pleased to have experienced an important chapter in his boxing education.

“I maybe said I’d stop him to hype it up and get people interested, but at the back of my mind I knew it would be a 12-round fight,” he said.

“It’s a big learning curve in my career, my first 12-round fight. Maybe I held back a bit and there were some things I did wrong, but that’s all learned now.”

Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn echoed the sentiment, adding: “He needs more fights like that against tough opponents. He’ll watch that video 100 times and being so smart, so clever, he’ll continue to improve.”

Matthew Macklin’s bid to wrest the WBA middleweight title away from Germany’s Felix Sturm ended in heroic failure in the Lanxess Arena in Cologne on Saturday night. The Irishman dropped a split decision after 12 fantastic rounds with two judges favouring Sturm by 116-112 and the other seeing it 115-113 for Macklin.

Former world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis believes David Haye will need a repeat of his performance against Nikolay Valuev if he is to see off Wladimir Klitschko in their eagerly-awaited unification bout in Hamburg next weekend.

Haye secured the WBA heavyweight crown with a brilliant mix of work-rate and accuracy against Valuev in a November 2009 fight that was billed as ‘David and Goliath’. Since that success Haye has been desperate to face Wladimir or his brother Vitali, and he will finally get his wish at the Imtech Arena on Saturday.

Lewis said: “Klitschko is the best right now, he is the man everyone is aiming to get at. It’s really tough to be heavyweight champion of the world and it’s even tougher to stay there. His strength is his size, his reach and his weight. He is a true heavyweight and weighs about 20lbs more than David Haye. He has all those advantages and on paper he is the one they will pick to win because he is a natural heavyweight.

“His weakness is his chin, his speed and maybe his stamina. And they are things that David Haye can expose.

“His weight is a big thing for Wladimir Klitschko, Haye is light but he can use it to his advantage if he can stay away from him.”