Frazer Clarke, a well accomplished amateur who won bronze at the Tokyo Olympics, is making his professional debut. This doesn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary until you look into who Clarke is fighting and then wonder how this bout got sanctioned.
Jake Darnell has never boxed in a professional ring and his only experience appears to be a few white collar and bareknuckle matches. To add to this farce he hasn’t even had much success in those scenes but is apparently a reasonable opponent for an Olympians debut. I don’t put any of the blame on Frazer Clarke as he doesn’t choose his opponents and will just want to make his debut and progress with his career. The people I do put the blame on are Boxxer his promoter and more importantly the British board of control for sanctioning the fight. If Boxxer can’t find a semi-respectable opponent then they should just reschedule the fight instead of putting on a dangerous mismatch. The British board of control like to harp on about how much they care about fighter safety and will often not allow fighters to fight due to health concerns but for some reason have no problem with this fight. In this match up we have a fit healthy Olympian who’s had over a 100 amateur fights versus an out of shape, inexperienced fighter who’s only had a few white collar and bare knuckle fights where he’s had very limited success. The British board of control clearly think this is a fight that is good enough to be sanctioned and if so they should be ashamed of themselves. This is a dangerous fight that will end in a first round KO for Frazer Clarke, the out-come is in no doubt so much so that the bookies have suspended round betting on the bout as everyone knows Frazer Clarke wins in the first round.
I think if the British board of control actually care about fighters health and not just helping out promoters then they shouldn’t have sanctioned this farce of a fight. The reality is that the British board of control are a bunch of out of touch old men who are slowly running British boxing into the ground and taking away any credibility that British boxing has. Unfair decisions happen on a weekly basis, blatant dangerous mismatches are approved and nothing has ever been done about the current journeyman system where dozen’s of fighters are paid to turn up and lose without putting too much effort in to win. They could attempt to adapt to the Japanese system where boxer’s have to fight people on their skill level even early on and this would reduce the lopsided losing records and also mean we stop getting fighters with 16 wins, zero knockouts who can’t perform past area level but have an inflated record due to feasting on fighters who are 9-116.
None of this will happen though and this mismatch will be swept under the rug and put down as the promotion struggling to find opponents even though that is an even more embarrassing excuse. They’ve had eight weeks to make a fight for Clarke and this is the best they could come up with, both Boxxer and the British board of control should be ashamed.