Ronan Mullen

But there was no great outrage when eventually he did speak to media because he knew himself that the performance, even if he'd squeaked the result, it wasn't going to get him to where he was.

And like a lot of boxers, like delusion is both their enemy and their friend.

But in this case, it was striking to see that interview.

I know he's sitting there and his daughter is behind him.

And like it's a defeated fighter with a big gash in the middle of his head from a clash of heads he had.

And he's talking about the end.

And in some ways, it's a career unfulfilled if you only judge it by winning a world title, which I'm sure to some extent he did.

Yeah.

But, I mean, he seems to have had the realisation that he's finished, which a lot of boxers don't have.

He's 34 and he admitted himself that he has a lifestyle that boxing has given him that 99% of pro boxers don't get it.

So there's probably a different way of looking at it as well, which is the human way, which we probably don't analyse enough.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd say with Paddy Barnes around that time as well, like there was...

You know, because I would have consumed a lot of what the Irish boxing writers were writing about this and it was hard not to implicate the fighters in it.

Like fighters by their nature are going to go with the backers who are going to do best for their career.

I'm not sure the extent to which, I can't remember the extent maybe to which, because I remember Barnes was...

he did sort of justify the stance.

You know, he kind of, I can't remember Mick Conlon basically saying, well, this is the right thing for MTK to do, to have a blanket ban on kind of Southern media.

And I wasn't invested enough in Michael Conlon's story to necessarily be outraged by it.

But all that happened was, as Rowan says, disassociated from his career until, you know, his fights were on and you might watch them.