Eighty Thousand at Croke Park for Katie Taylor's Last Fight and the Ring Walk Is Just After Ten
Taylor defends four light-welterweight belts against Flora Pili in a sold-out Croke Park, and has said it is the last time she fights.
Katie Taylor fights Flora Pili at Croke Park on Saturday night, in front of eighty thousand people, and has said it is the last time she will fight at all.
The WBA, WBO, WBC and IBF light-welterweight belts are on the line, though the belts are not really the point of the evening. Taylor is forty. She won Olympic gold in London in 2012, turned professional in 2016, and spent the last four years in a trilogy with Amanda Serrano that twice filled Madison Square Garden.
Croke Park is a stadium built for Gaelic games. It has staged a professional boxing card only rarely, and the last one anybody brings up is Muhammad Ali against Al Blue Lewis in 1972. Eighty thousand seats sold.
The card starts at seven o'clock and the ring walk is expected just after ten, which is a long wait, so the undercard has been built to fill it. Dave Allen meets Thomas Carty at heavyweight, Paddy Donovan meets Tyrone McKenna at welterweight, Taylor Bevan meets Emmet Brennan, and Molly McCann, formerly of the UFC, meets Sylwia Doligala.
It is on RTE2 and the RTE Player in Ireland, and on DAZN elsewhere as part of a subscription rather than as a pay-per-view. For a card this size that is unusual, and it was a deliberate decision rather than an oversight.
Pili has not fought at anything close to this scale before. That is the standard shape of a farewell opponent, and it is also the standard shape of an upset, which is the only reason a farewell is worth watching.