Boxing: Time running out for Harrison after latest mismatch

Another Saturday night and another joke fight in the career of the fallen idol Audley Harrison. However, the Olympic champion has insisted that next year he will get serious and finally chose a name from a shortlist of eager British heavyweights.

The American Wade Lewis had no right to pull on the gloves on Saturday night and he was risking his health when he climbed through the ropes to meet Harrison in a fight that nobody expected to last more than one or two rounds. Harrison dropped Lewis a total of three times before the massacre was called off after 43 seconds of round two at the Olympia in Liverpool.

Harrison won for the seventh time but he will turn 31 later this month and he is fast running out of time in his effort to convince the BBC that he is worth more investment when his present contract expires in three fights' time.

There is surely no way that the broadcasters can justify extending his contract if Harrison persists in importing the type of fighters that led the corporation to drastically curtail its boxing programme a few years ago after a decade of dubious Frank Bruno mismatches. Even Bruno's management would have struggled to explain the comic realities of Harrison's latest victim.

Now he has three fights to change the public's perception of his abilities, boxing fans having avoided his bouts since his entertaining debut in May last year when over 7,000 paid. On Saturday about 1,200 packed the Olympia but the undercard featured several popular Liverpool fighters.

Harrison will face another bum in London in November and that will be his final fight against an inept import because he has promised to select one of the British fighters who will give him a proper test. Harrison has started to talk like he is serious. That must means an end to men like Lewis in the opposite corner and an end to excuses about stamina. He should be able to go 10 rounds now.

There is no escaping the truth that Lewis was dreadful and Harrison, his management and the BBC should have made that painfully clear. It is equally obvious, even if it was overlooked by the happy BBC crew on the night, that Harrison would not have hit half of the heavyweights in the world with the fabulous punches that dropped Lewis because at least that number of fighters have a modicum of basic boxing skills.

The risk that Harrison runs is that he will totally lose the public before he steps up in class and meets a fighter with a respectable record. The good-natured jeers on Saturday night that greeted his belated entrance in the ring could turn nasty if his next opponents are selected from the files kept by men like Johnny Bos, a legendary boxing agent from New York who is known as 'The Gravedigger.'

Harrison can use Bos one more time to provide a turkey before Christmas but then he must listen to his critics and choose from the British quartet of Pele Reid, Mike Holden, Michael Sprott or Mark Potter for his next opponent. If he continues to fight no-hopers there is no way that even the people at the BBC will be able to keep a straight face when they talk about their plans for Harrison.

The quality and timing of his finishing shots on Saturday was impressive and far better than the wild punches that Lennox Lewis required to beat Liverpool's Noel Quarless in two rounds in his seventh fight in 1989. Lewis was the main attraction that night, just like Harrison, but the comparisons end there because Quarless could really fight. Hopefully in the new year we will get the chance to find out if Harrison can.