Barry McGuigan sure talk is cheap before Carl Frampton faces Scott Quigg

Johnny Nelson has witnessed a tense fight week before Carl Frampton vs Scott Quigg and believes one man might be struggling to make the 122lbs super-bantamweight limit.

Tickets for the evening sold out in under 10 minutes and a capacity crowd of over 20,000 will be packed into the Manchester Arena.

“I have been preparing very thoroughly for the contest, which is an incredible opportunity for me as part of the undercard on what is the biggest fight anywhere in these islands throughout this year”.

“People haven’t seen the best of me yet and any of the doubters, this is going to be the fight that makes them sit up and say “F**k me, Frampton can actually fight”, says the IBF world champion, who is not in the habit of liberally dropping profanities into interviews.

“This fight is a big deal back home and I know a lot of people are going to be supporting me”.

Press Eye – Belfast – Northern Ireland – 6th November 2009 – Picture by Jonathan Porter / Press Eye – Barry Hearn in association with Brian Peters Promotions presents Sky Sports fight night at the Meadowbank Sports Arena, Magerafelt, Northern Ireland. A few of us are renting George’s flat from him and you need to constantly be on your toes because if you’re not, you’ll get caught out and ripped to shreds.

Frampton was strengthened in those convictions by McGuigan, a Catholic who married a Protestant at the height of The Troubles and became an icon for peace in Ulster as well as a world featherweight champion of all-Irish legend.

Quigg looks bigger already, and this is before the weigh-in.

Frampton is faintly embarrassed by such compliments but says: ‘Well, I do think I have a better boxing brain than Scott and that will enable me to adapt to whatever he does in the fight. I’ll go out and do a job on Carl, win in a spectacular fashion and that’s going to give me a boost for my profile in the U.S. They didn’t want it, end of story.

“It is really going to hit him on Saturday night”. He’s much calmer than I was in a fight.

“I’ve always likened it to the version of (Marco Antonio) Barrera-(Erik) Morales I”, Gallagher said of the legendary 2000 unification fight between the future Hall of Famers. I think the same can be said of Scott Quigg, but for Carl it comes more naturally.

Frampton is fighting for domestic bragging rights, to open his route to bouts of even greater magnitude overseas, to scotch Quigg’s claims of superiority once and for all.

“I know I’m biased, but I think Frampton’s flying”, the Commonwealth gold medallist says.

I think Santa Cruz is pretty much in the same boat as Rigondeaux is in terms of him being just too good and too risky for Frampton and Quigg to try and fight them.

‘He did the early work on me before handing over the regular duties to Shane. What someone does in a fight six months prior does not have much bearing because you can improve on that. In the second half of the fight, Santa Cruz pulled away and won in style with his superior skills.

I know, though, that his message would have certainly been to keep going and carry on working hard. There are other major fights out there for him, too. They’ve all kind of taken me in, they’ve all look after me. It’s just one of those things you have to do in boxing – it’s not healthy, it’s not good for you – but it’s what you have to do if you’re stuck for weight. I was talking to my hero, the great McGuigan.