Boxing: McCullough aiming to be a hit on Belfast homecoming

Like his official website, Wayne McCullough is work under reconstruction. However unlike www.pocketrocketbox.com, an address which is as subtle an indication of his style as a stiff jab in the face, the all-action Irishman appears to be in a hurry to make up for lost time.

McCullough understands the importance of giving fans value for money and when he steps into Maysfield's Leisure Centre ring in Belfast next Saturday the atmosphere will get the punches flowing as much as the adrenalin.

For it's his celebrated "homecoming", the 32-year-old's first fight in front of his home crowd in years, having packed his bags and headed for the lights of Las Vegas in 1993. The featherweight with the pocket-rocket sobriquet, his career has come full circle. No one will be making apologies that next week's opponent, who was named last Friday as Russian Nikolai Eremeev, is someone expected to give the Irish buzzsaw a few rounds to show he still has plenty in the tank and then slink off into the cold night, comforted by a fistful of euros. Eremeev was stopped in six rounds by Alex Arthur; this is scheduled to go 10. It won't.

McCullough has famously emerged from a 20-month battle with the British Boxing Board of Control; the boxer was banned from the ring here because the board discovered a cyst in his head, but not on the brain, before an October 2000 bout against Hungary's Sandor Kocvak. Despite being repeatedly cleared across the Atlantic, the local authorities refused to issue him a licence and an ambition to perform in front of his home fans was put on hold.

Having eased back into action in London last month with a routine four-round stoppage of the ill-equipped South African Johannes Maisa he now heads north for the latest paragraph in a professional career launched on the back of that 1992 Olympic silver medal. Though he can be beaten (as three fighters, including Naseem Hamed, have shown), McCullough's style is based on a high level of fitness and unrelenting workrate. And a framed certificate hanging on a wall in his home which is Ring magazine's award for the "Best Chin in Boxing" tells its own tale.

Team Shamrock, comprising promoter Frank Warren – who took great delight in watching another of the featherweights under his wing, Scott Harrison, lift the WBO title in Glasgow last week – manager and wife Cheryl, head trainer Kenny Croom, doctor Sam Colarusso, and cornerman Roy Page have plotted a world title challenge within two or three fights.

Promotional problems and a long lay-off mean McCullough has only been called into the ring 28 times in nearly a decade, but he has run the gamut of emotions. Victories (25 of them, including for the WBC bantamweight belt in 1995), have been tempered by those defeats (to Mexicans Daniel Zaragoza and Erik Morales in shots at the super-bantamweight championship and to Hamed at featherweight), while the battle with the BBB of C who famously declared that "one more blow on the head could kill him" genuinely planted a few demons alongside that cyst.

Now cleared, McCullough feels reinvented as a fighter, reborn as a man. Having made Las Vegas his home away from home, he's one of the few to leave that gambling mecca richer than when he first entered and, if not on the express route back to the top, he is going faster than most of the trains across Britain. The pocket rocket is back in business, which is more than can be said of his official website. Without the internet to convey his message, he is going to have to do his talking with his fists. Belfast on a Saturday night seems as good a place for that as any.