Boxing: De la Hoya the main course to follow Jones

Britain's Clinton Woods, the latest fodder for the showboat caperings of the world's undisputed light-heavyweight champion, Roy Jones, fought gamely until his corner and the referee simultaneously decided that the grisly show had gone on quite long enough.

Nothing defines the current problems of boxing quite like the career of Jones, a marvellously talented fighter, who long ago settled for the easiest of pickings. The point has been made here before, and has to be tempered on this occasion by the fact that Woods was the official No 1 challenger, but something the beaten man said in his post-fight BBC interview was especially jarring.

Woods, who misguidedly had shown his version of the "Ali Shuffle" to a fighter inhabiting another planet, refused to complain about the showboating of Jones once the fight was plainly over. In fact, he shrugged and said: "It's what the fans expect."

To be more precise, it is what they are required to make do with. What they would really like is a vaguely competitive fight. It is to be hoped that the BBC will have something more substantial to show next weekend when they run Oscar de la Hoya against Fernando Vargas. De la Hoya, despite his setbacks, is still ranked among the top five or six fighters across the weights.

De la Hoya was once rated the hope of boxing. Vargas is a bit of a whirlwind. Fights fans will thus, relatively speaking, look forward to a feast. Or, with a Lewis-Tyson reprise in the works, maybe a Last Supper.