'For this to happen is devastating'

BOXING: JOE WARD INTERVIEW: The young Moate fighter is hurt, down and very, very annoyed, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON

THE DAY after the night before. Joe Ward is hurt and down and annoyed. Ward has learned another lesson in high stakes sport where you think you are the centrepiece and find out there is a bigger game that has other plans.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how hard you want it, how good you are or how well you have prepared. Ward thought he knew the worth of diligence and training. He believed his talent carried the freight of certainty and reward. He knows a lot more now.

If Trabzon has done anything for him it has hardened his heart. Listen and hear the cynicism growing in an 18-year-old voice. Look and see confusion in his eyes. All Ward clings to now is the meaningless fact that he won a boxing match, that wasn’t given to him. It is almost nothing at all. But it is the truth.

“I felt I was doing what I needed to do,” he says. “I thought that right through the whole nine minutes. After every round I kept saying to myself I was winning it.

“I didn’t get what I deserved from the start. How boxing comes to this stage . . . This is an Olympic qualifier and for this to happen is devastating for me . . . for this to happen to me and for me to probably not go to an Olympic Games when I dreamed about it all of my life . . .

“But I knew coming here fighting against a Turk in Turkey. . . you know. I was coming in here and everything had been going well for me. It’s just where it was. And there’s nothing I could have done because I was in the fight.

“I couldn’t control the five judges around to press the buttons. I was doing everything I could for them to press the button for me.”

Ward’s story comes gift wrapped with the label “Another boxer crows about a bad decision”. It arrives from a sport that has often scarred its best. Ask Roy Jones junior. Ask Katie Taylor and there, too, maybe stop and pause about her qualifying appointment in May at the World Championships. Could it be possible that Chongqing in south-west China could unravel like another story from the shores of The Black Sea?

Ward’s case still hums in Trabzon but just in the Irish corner, as the rest of the boxing world races on towards London 2012. He has time on his side and he will be 22 when the process for entry into Rio 2016 begins.

But no decisions are being made in the stew he’s in at the moment. He has had offers and promises of a lucrative career. But today he is not turning professional. He’s trying to be philosophical. But anger leaks out of his pores.

“I mean it’s life I suppose . . . but it’s really disappointing when stuff like this goes on and you win a bout and you don’t get it. Everyone knows who was watching the fight. Everyone knows I should have won the fight. He’s known. He lives in this town . . . it’s very disappointing.

“I watched the fight this morning and I’m more annoyed now knowing that I really did win by six or seven points. I watched the whole bout. It’s very hard when you are in there but when I watched I knew, yeah, I really did win it.

“How there were five judges who couldn’t see me win the fight. That’s very annoying. Four years is a very long time away but I’ll go home and sit down with my team and see where we go from here. I always knew that I was good enough to be in the Olympic Games.”

Eddie Bolger, an Irish boxing champion of the 1980s, has always been more than just a coach to Ward. Ward lives in Moate but Bolger’s house in Wexford has a room with Joe’s name on it. In becoming the third-ranked light heavyweight in the world, Ward sometimes required space to work. Ward is no accidental talent.

Hard as he tried Bolger couldn’t see Joe behind in the first round. He couldn’t see him behind in the second either and he believes the Irish backroom team who say when they slowed down the third round Joe was hit four times and landed 12.

“This will help him down the line. I know it’s a bitter pill to swallow,” says Bolger. “It’s hard for all of us to take at the minute. Yeah . . . redraw the map a little bit now.

“Frank (Walsh), myself and Joe will go home and sit down. My most important issue now is to make Joe realise that he is still only a young lad. We might have been all guilty of thinking he owed us something. He didn’t.

“In four years’ time he’ll still only be a young lad. These things will make him better. Maybe something will come out of it. I think everyone knows there was an injustice done whether it was intentionally or the way things went.”

Filling the months and year ahead is the hard part. Next year’s World Championships are in Kazakhstan. It would be nice to win something there. Then again that wasn’t part of the dream.