Jack Charlton once said that his biggest honour wasn’t the World Cup he won with his country or the trophies and titles he won with his club, it was the fact he could walk down a street in Leeds and people would only know him as ‘Jack’. Josh Warrington is a two-time featherweight champion of the world, the only male world champion in his city’s history. But in Leeds, Josh Warrington is Josh.

Josh was fighting at the weekend, so that meant his mob of supporters were heading to Sheffield, plenty of them straight from Elland Road, in his challenge to win a third world title from Leigh Wood. Given Wood is from Nottingham, and enjoys a similar backing from Notts Forest fans, it was decided they’d meet in the middle.

The prospect of a few thousand Leeds and Forest fans meeting in Sheffield prompted expectations of a scene from Saving Private Ryan. I was meeting my old housemate from university, Al, in Sheffield. He’s from Watford, so we’d already agreed that if we bumped into any Wood fans, he’d do the talking in his neutral accent and I’d keep shtum. But Sheffield wasn’t the battleground people were expecting. At Leeds train station, I was surprised to spot a group of Sheffield United fans who had travelled in the opposite direction to their away game at Fulham, as if they were just happy to get out of their city and leave it to us for the day. When me and Al reached our first pub in Sheffield, I tried to keep my voice down while talking about football — there was a table of Forest fans next to us — until I realised I’d at least have the support of the landlord behind the bar, who had unzipped his hoody to reveal a Leeds United t-shirt. In fact, it was the first time I’ve been to watch Josh box and the only fighting was in the ring.

After checking into our hotel near Meadowhall, we headed back out. In the taxi, the driver asked if we were off to the fight, and started telling us how close we were to the legendary Ingle Boxing Gym, famous for producing the spectacular former world champion Naseem Hamed. “You won’t find anyone in Sheffield with a good word to say about Prince Naseem,” he said. “He’s up his own arse. And he’s a right fat bastard.” Forget Prince Naseem, he continued, Herol Graham was the one.

An elusive, elegant boxer, ‘Bomber’ Graham is considered one of Britain’s greatest fighters to never win a world title. He was a challenger three times, most cruelly losing to the frightening Julian Jackson in 1990. After a masterful opening three rounds from Graham, Jackson’s left eye had closed and he was told he only had one more round by the referee. Seconds away from victory, Graham was knocked out cold by the ‘punch of the century’. It was the start of a spiral that resulted in a penniless Graham being sectioned after attempting to take his own life in retirement. The writer Tris Dixon’s book on brain trauma in boxing, Damage, opens with Dixon visiting Graham on the psychiatric ward of a London hospital. “That was it,” Graham says of Jackson’s punch. “That was the beginning and end of it, if you know what I mean.”

Inside Sheffield Arena, the crowd was split in half: one side of the ring Nottingham, the other Leeds. The only segregation was a block in the middle, full of fans supporting the Doncaster boxer Terri Harper on the undercard. When Josh walked to the ring to Marching On Together, those ‘neutrals’ were only cheering for one fighter, and it wasn’t the lad from Yorkshire. Not that you could hear them.

Josh was considered the underdog against Wood, who is three years older but has fought four fewer bouts and far fewer rounds. Wood, in theory, was fresher, hungrier, and riding the momentum of his fourth fight in eighteen months. Since the pandemic, their two careers have gone in opposite directions.

But Josh was sensational. Josh was dominating. Josh was bullying Wood to the ropes, rocking him with combinations. Josh was winning. One side of the arena was electric. ‘Your support is fucking shit!’ Whenever I tried to predict the outcome in the build up to the fight, I’d convince myself of one scenario then reason the complete opposite was just as likely. I’d eventually settled on hoping that if Josh started fast, he’d win. “Halfway there,” I said to Al after the sixth. “Just don’t walk onto one.” Round seven looked no different to the previous six. Then Josh went down, and the referee was waving his arms to stop the fight. Fuck. I was still trying to process what had happened when I turned around and realised the block we were in had emptied. While I stared at the ceiling a little while longer, Al was doing his best to put a brave face on and pretend it wasn’t awkward. He’d bet on either fighter to win in the seventh, and was secretly delighted.

It wasn’t until we left the arena that I started questioning what had happened. The referee had deducted a point from Josh in that final round for punches around the back of Wood’s head, which had seemed relatively innocuous. Put it this way, Josh has fought a lot rougher and not been docked a point. Trying to ensure the deduction didn’t mean he lost the round, Josh ended the last ten seconds aggressively and was caught on the chin by a sneaky right hand that wobbled him, followed by a burst of five punches to the head that sent him to the deck, the last of which sickeningly connected as he was already falling.

It was ugly. His back crashed against the deck and his arms rocked above his head. But he got up quickly — too quickly — and staggered back to his corner with his back to the referee. The bell had already signalled the end of the round, and Josh sheepishly smiled at his trainer and dad Sean O’Hagan. “For fuck’s sake,” he muttered. The ref was still counting, and Josh was still facing his corner, holding onto the ropes as he waited for his legs to steady. He turned around on the eight count, at which point it was immediately waved off. The ref could have given him a minute to recover, like Wood had benefited from at the end of the first round in his thrilling win over Michael Conlan, but Josh wasn’t given the same chance. “I feel robbed,” he said afterwards in his changing room. Josh’s former opponent, the two-weight world champion Carl Frampton, had tipped Wood to win. “That was, in my opinion,” he said of the stoppage, “out of order.”

The brutality of the finish wasn’t due to the punches Wood landed — the cuts and bruises on Wood’s face afterwards looked far sorer than Josh’s — but the shift in just a few seconds from Josh winning comfortably to everyone having to go home. In a perverse way, it was still exhilarating. Sport makes junkies of us all, willing to risk the worst night of our lives for our best. For six rounds it felt like we might get the magic of the latter. By the end of the seventh it was closer to the former.

It has been a long time since I’ve felt so gutted by a sporting result. Leeds United were so pathetically bad in getting relegated last season it was hard to argue with. Leeds Rhinos lost the Super League Grand Final last year, but it felt like a victory just getting there. Even though his support is the envy of most boxers in the country, I often feel frustrated that we don’t appreciate Josh enough. We celebrate our heroes because their stories are littered with so many ups and at least as many downs. We understand that daring to be great comes at a cost. In Leeds, football means Revie’s United. Rugby league means Sinfield’s Rhinos. And boxing means Josh. Except Josh is happening now, in front of our eyes, on our doorstep.

Jamie Peacock once said he felt a responsibility that the Rhinos gave Leeds some glory at a time when United were falling down the Football League. Josh carried on where Peacock and his teammates left off. He became world champion for the first time in 2018, a year after the Rhinos won their last Grand Final, and only relinquished his title when United were about to finish ninth in the Premier League. A month after Leeds sacked Marcelo Bielsa, Josh won his world title back. Billy Bremner had enough rotten luck to fill a dozen careers, yet he always insisted he loved every minute of being a footballer. Despite all the setbacks in the last three years, Josh is the same. In a video he posted on Instagram thanking fans for their support, Josh said: “That’s the reason I do it. I absolutely love those nights.”

Which partly added to the perversity of how I felt after the fight. Bielsa is still loved at Marseille for his speech in the changing rooms after his players had lost narrowly to title rivals PSG. “There is nothing now that will calm you down, because you have been broken in this match, and you haven’t received what you deserve,” he said. “Accept the injustice. Everything evens itself out in the end — swallow the poison.” People still talk and write about Bielsa’s words. They don’t mention Marseille lost their next three games and finished fourth. Like United’s play-off defeat to Derby, I’ve got no plan of watching the fight back. I’ll just remember the taste of poison, and trust Bielsa that everything will even itself out, no matter how long it takes. Wood has been promised his next fight will be at his beloved City Ground, but he needs a dance partner who will help him fill it. A rematch with Josh makes the most sense for everyone.

Not that it made the result any easier. Struggling to get a taxi after leaving the arena, we decided to walk back towards the city until we could catch one back into town and burn off the adrenaline with a final few drinks. We ended up walking down a canal, feeling smug with ourselves for finding a tram stop away from the crowds. The feeling didn’t last long. It turned out we were walking in the completely wrong direction. The tram pulled up by the arena and was soon filled with fans from Nottingham, at which point we understood it was best to keep quiet. It was no bother. I didn’t feel like talking much anyway. ⬢