Boxing: Hamed's bluster now sounds like an old, scratched record

Sheffield fighter's return to the ring turns sour as disgruntled fans deliver their verdict with their feet on a pedestrian performance

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Prince with few subjects as crowd leaves farce early

Thirteen months after being taken apart by the morally superior fighter Marco Antonio Barrera, and having all his foibles and deceits exposed one by one in a wonderfully thorough exhibition of intelligent ringcraft, Naseem Hamed may have offered the perfect epilogue for a tawdry fight night and a bankrupt career.

"Who," Hamed mouthed to a pay-per-view television camera, "gives a f... about the crowd?"

Certainly not the fighter who larded himself with the title Prince. Later, after his 12-round points victory over the competent but feather-punching Spaniard Manuel Calvo had provoked walk-outs, boos and slow-handclapping, Hamed added, "They just don't know the craft and the art of boxing."

Like his own performance, the comments were bizarrely out of sync. A few years ago, when Hamed's hype was burning bright, when his sneering, leering entrances were embraced as the epitome of modern boxing entertainment, his Saturday night bout of punter appraisal would have found little argument here.

But now Naseem has to deal with the truth declared by Abraham Lincoln, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time". It is advice that should be heeded by Sky's normally admirable commentary team of Ian Darke and Glenn McCrory.

Sadly, on this occasion McCrory, whose sense of boxing reality was heightened by sparring 100 rounds with Mike Tyson, for most of the time went limply along with Darke's decision to re-invest in the old illusions that Barrera so brilliantly swept away in Las Vegas.

"He wants," Darke said of the disjointed, shambling, lunging, posturing figure utterly unable to inflict any of his old power and unorthodox furies on Calvo, "to go down as a fighter history will regard as a modern great. Boxing needs stars – Hamed is certainly that." Not this night, he wasn't – no more than the last time he was in the ring, when Barrera's six-year-old assertion that Hamed was a creation of television salesmanship and relentlessly judicious match-making was so relentlessly justified.

Darke was outraged by the first wave of booing and said that Hamed was entitled to look a little ring rusty. Then, quite shamefully, he invoked the names of great men. He reminded his audience that fighters such as Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson had risen gloriously from defeat.

Fortunately for the finer feelings of all those who had paid out their £15 for viewing rights, the studio panel delivering a crushingly unanimous verdict. Barry McGuigan, Nicky Piper, Duke McKenzie and Spencer Oliver all agreed that Hamed appeared to have learned nothing from his humiliation at the hands of Barrera. There had been no tightening of his technique, no concession to rudimentary defence, no hint that that his mind had been concentrated by the scale of that defeat.

Indeed, the humility by-pass operation was still ragingly effective. He was ready to fight Johnny Tapia, Barrera, anyone you cared to mention, in two months. It was like listening to an old, scratched record. But it was more than tiresome. It was insulting to every paying customer, and your sense of that could only have been intensified if you had happened to be in Las Vegas when Hamed's American paymasters, Home Box Office, delivered their withering prognosis on his career prospects.

HBO, their executive Kerry Davis made it clear, would continue their interest in Hamed as a front-rank boxing draw only if he agreed to return to the ring with Barrera. Though the Mexican's victory was profound, Naseem's bombast and power would give a re-match an appeal of its own. Certainly Hamed could look for no shorter route to redemption, and if he avoided the challenge the implication would be obvious.

It would say that after all the years of gorging himself on easy victories, he had no stomach for a real fight. Going into the Barrera fight he had buoyed himself with the widespread, though for some judges less than compelling, theory that he would simply carry too much power for Barrera, and that the Mexican would be unable to curb his naturally aggressive instincts and fight smartly enough to neutralise the weight of Hamed's punch. The pre-fight composure of Barrera, and the wild and incoherent manner of Hamed, was thus a great comfort to those so happy to take the 4-1 odds against Barrera.

That is all history now, but the mark it has left on Hamed was plain enough on Saturday night. The hype continues to melt. It brings him to a point, at 28, where he has to answer some hard questions. Can he re-convert the fans who once gave him such an uncritical ride? Has he the energy to re-make his career, and to find at such a late hour some respect for the trade which has brought down so many better men? Has he the nerve to go in again with a someone who has the ability to truly hit back?

If he cannot give a positive answer to all those questions, he should walk away. Before more damage is done. Before the walk-outs decide it just isn't worth walking up.