Boxing: Calzaghe the Hottest of Home-town Favourites

The biggest British boxing crowd since Chris Eubank faced Nigel Benn in front of 47,000 at Old Trafford in 1993 will watch Joe Calzaghe defend his World Boxing Organisation super-middleweight title for the 20th time at the Millennium Stadium tonight when he faces Peter Manfredo, one of the stars of the US boxing reality TV show, The Contender.

With the stadium roof closed and a crowd in excess of 35,000 anticipated, the game American Manfredo will have to cope with a deafening and partisan Welsh audience as well as an opponent who would appear to be a class removed from anyone he has previously fought. "I really don’t think Manfredo quite understands what he has let himself in for, but he will pretty soon learn," says the World Boxing Union middleweight champion Gary Lockett, another Welshman, who defends his title against Warrington’s Lee Blundell on tonight’s bill.

Lockett has been Calzaghe’s principal sparring partner, so he knows as well as anybody how much the 35-year-old champion still has of the talent that has made him the longest current reigning world champion, with more than nine years having elapsed since he defeated Eubank to claim the WBO crown.

"It is his speed that makes him so exceptional," says Lockett. "I can normally go 10 rounds, no problem, but Joe is so fast and throws so many punches that you find yourself trying to stay with him, and after four or five rounds you feel yourself getting knackered. I just can’t see Manfredo being able to handle Joe’s intensity." Manfredo revels in the celebrity brought him by the part he played in the first series of The Contender, when he finished runner-up to the eventual winner Sergio Mora. With the series consultant, the sixtime world champion Sugar Ray Leonard, acting as his mentor and trained by the Los Angeles guru Freddie Roach, there is no doubt Manfredo has improved since then and his last two fights have brought quick wins. Whether that improvement is sufficient to test Calzaghe, one of the world’s elite, is another matter.

A punch-flattened nose shows clearly that Manfredo, physically very much the smaller man, is not the hardest target to hit. He is brave, committed and will realise he has been presented with the opportunity of a lifetime, but it seems unlikely that his big heart will be enough to bridge what would appear to be a gulf in talent, unless Calzaghe begins to feel his long career and 35 years are working against him .

There is a school of thought that Calzaghe’s last defence, an October points victory against the rugged Cameroon-born Australian Sakio Bika, provided evidence the champion may have peaked with his extraordinary win in a title unification battle against the previously undefeated American Jeff Lacy 13 months-ago. Facing Bika, Calzaghe was cut and dragged into a foul-strewn brawl. Ultimately he prevailed through fighting instinct more than the boxing skills that had so comprehensively bamboozled Lacy.

However, the suggestion that the march of time caused Calzaghe’s discomfort against Bika is harsh. Perhaps it was more that he underestimated his powerfully built opponent and was too eager to find a rapid and spectacular win when a more prudent course would have been to take his time to box his way towards victory. Calzaghe’s tendency to allow himself to be dragged into macho displays of bravado might thrill the crowd, but the champion admits: "Sometimes I am my own worst enemy. Something happens, like when Bika butted me and I think ‘all right, that’s the way you want it, let’s see what you have got’. I can box, or I can fight. Anyway you want it, I find a way to win.

"There is no way that I will underestimate Manfredo. He has nothing to lose and I expect him to put up the fight of his life. But I am going out in front of a huge crowd in Cardiff. It has taken me a long time to get here, but this is a dream come true for me. He has sounded confident, but I will take that confidence out of him. He is going in against the best super-middleweight in the world, and I will prove again that I am No1."

Manfredo’s trainer, Roach, is currently in Puerto Rico preparing Oscar De La Hoya for his showdown with Floyd Mayweather early next month, so the challenger’s corner tonight will be run by his father, Peter Manfredo Snr. It is another factor in Calzaghe’s favour in a fight where, assuming the champion does not have problems with his sometimes fragile hands, it is difficult to see Manfredo surviving far beyond the halfway stage.