The sight of Wesley Street, over the way from Elland Road and running steeply towards the top of Beeston Hill, gets Josh Warrington talking about the bad old days.
He thinks back to a Tuesday night when he and a friend sprinted down that hill, trying to get to Elland Road’s ticket office in time for a game between Leeds United and Hull City. They had left it late because, to be painfully honest, they weren’t sure if they could be bothered. Leeds were in a cycle of inspiring nobody. True to form, they lost 3-2. “We’d dragged ourselves there and came away thinking, ‘What a load of shite that was’,” Warrington says. “There were loads of tickets and loads of seats. It’s how it was.”
His friend brought up that story six years later, a few hours before the night of Warrington’s life. They were in a minibus together and driving past the bottom of Wesley Street. On this Saturday afternoon, the streets around Elland Road were crawling, cooking in sunshine and a lazy heat. Football crowds have a regular vibe, made up of people who have their routines set in stone. This was something else entirely, a one-off moment in the city of Leeds’ history and, on May 19, 2018, the only place to be.
In contrast, the weather today is freezing and Warrington is wrapped up warm with a coffee in hand, but the sensation of what happened here, the warm glow, is flooding back. “The mind works in pictures,” he says. “As soon as I start talking about it, it’s all there, all the emotion. My pal reminded me of us racing down Beeston Hill when we got here. He’s an estate lad and he’s not an emotional speaker normally, but it was him who said, ‘Look where we were. Look where we are’. Everything was about to change.”
And change it did. Leeds, as a footballing hotbed, had made a habit of punching below its weight, its only club awash with mediocrity and empty promises. The sole narrative around Leeds United was about what they might become if anyone got a grip, which nobody ever did. But then came May 2018 and an injection of lasting enlightenment. The city got its first boxing world champion. Elland Road shook the dust off and played its part in helping Warrington win that title. And a few weeks after a defining stadium fight, Leeds United got Marcelo Bielsa.
So began the summer of love.
Warrington has long been renowned as a ticket-seller, a description used as a compliment and a slur. He shifts far more tickets than the average boxer, in numbers many high-level fighters would kill for. His promoter, Frank Warren, booked Elland Road in May 2018 safe in the knowledge that a crowd of 20,000 would pack it out. But some who underrated Warrington or regarded him as a limited featherweight used his popularity in back-handed fashion, to imply that his ability to draw a crowd was commercially driven rather than a product of him winning major titles.
With Warrington, though, the growth of his popularity was organic. He was an ordinary kid who grew up in east Leeds with no PR machine behind him when he turned professional in 2009. At no stage was he marketed to the masses. “What happened with me didn’t happen overnight,” he says. “My first fight at Huddersfield Leisure Centre, I sold 60 tickets. My fourth fight, I ended up going on after the main event and there were about 40 people left. I’d use my spare wages to promote myself and print posters. I’d talk to anyone who seemed like they had any interest in boxing, anything to spread the word.”
As an amateur, Warrington got himself into the mindset that the best way to win fights was to be busy and in control; to let his hands go and make things happen. It was the birth of his philosophy as a boxer and, as time went on, it gave him box office appeal. But 2012 was crucial for him in starting to build a supporter base like very few others in the sport. That year took him to Dudley in the West Midlands for an English title bout with Chris Male. It was Male’s backyard, a hard contest, and Warrington won a 10-round tear-up on points.
“That was a bit of an away day,” Warrington says. “Videos of it started to circulate on social media and it made a bit of a stir. I’d taken about 80 down there but when I defended the title at Leeds Town Hall, we sold 500/600 tickets. I realised that if you give people something, they’ll come and see it. They want you to fight for titles and give them fights worth watching. For a long time, it was all word-of-mouth.”
Gradually, the sport started to recognise that Warrington’s knack of pulling in punters was rare. Hundreds became thousands and thousands turned out on repeat. He and Leeds United were intertwined, more so as time passed, and tapping into the club’s support was an open goal. Before moving to Warren’s stable, Warrington spent time under the promotional wing of Eddie Hearn, a master of the big sell. Hearn would talk about Warrington fighting at Elland Road. Everything about the idea made sense, not least the money.
“Once I got on the Eddie Hearn hype train, everything skyrocketed,” Warrington says. “I wasn’t this kid at leisure centres any more. I was in the national media and getting a world ranking. It was Leeds Town Hall, Leeds Arena, with crowds of 3,000 then 7,000 then 10,000. It took a long time to get going, but when it did, it was like pressing fast-forward.”
Elland Road was not a conventional boxing arena, which was to say that it rarely hosted bouts outside of its small conference facility. Henry Wharton had defended his Commonwealth super-middleweight title there in 1992, an open-air show that Warrington had heard spoken about in boxing circles. For a Leeds fan, the thought of doing the same was tantalising. “There were so many times when I sat in the stands thinking ‘I’d love to have it on that pitch’,” Warrington says. “But you never know if you’re just dreaming.”
Warrington and Hearn split in 2016. Warren stepped in and tied Warrington to a contract and, as Warrington puts it, “picked up the Elland Road plan and ran with it”. Warren was no less of a matchmaker than Hearn. A mover and shaker at the top of British boxing for decades, Warren told himself that Warrington at Leeds United’s stadium was a sure thing: financially huge, carrying mass appeal, a magnet for attention with the football season already over.
The opponent was perfect, too, the IBF featherweight champion Lee Selby. “Me and my old man had been studying Selby for years,” Warrington says. “It was a bit of an obsession because it felt like me against him was the way it was always going.” Their foresight was priceless.
Warrington’s ‘old man’, Sean O’Hagan, is also his trainer, an uber-relaxed, burly man with a broad Yorkshire accent and an amusing turn of phrase. Before retiring, O’Hagan drove a minibus transporting disabled children to and from school. He goes by the nickname ‘Johnny Kebab’, apparently because of a likeness to the comedian Johnny Vegas. And many times as a youngster, Warrington was told that keeping his father in his corner risked holding him back.
O’Hagan was not a qualified trainer when he started coaching Warrington as an amateur. “People would say to me, ‘If you want to get to the next level, you’ve got to get rid of your dad’,” Warrington says. “They’d tell me he had no boxing experience, he didn’t know anything, all of that. I was quite quiet and maybe they thought they could influence me, but even if I didn’t say much, I’d always assess things. What my dad said to me made sense. He made things simple. He’d say ‘do X’ and it would work. Some trainers spoke in science equations.
“It was nothing to do with our relationship. If it wasn’t working we’d have both said so because honestly, me and him can fight like f**k. But he wants it as much as me. I know he does. He’s just got a good way of hiding it. Any time he gets nervous, he takes himself off for 10 minutes and has a fag.”
I witnessed O’Hagan’s influence before Warrington beat Carl Frampton in an epic 12-rounder at the end of 2018. They were running through drills at a gym in the West Yorkshire town of Batley on a bitterly cold December morning and O’Hagan seemed worried that Warrington was failing to let his punches go properly, that his footwork was out of sync. They embarked on a long routine using small traffic cones in the ring, Warrington bouncing from toe to toe. When the Frampton fight came around, Warrington’s shots landed brutally. Frampton was lucky to see out the second round.
Selby had been in O’Hagan’s sights for a long time. A tidy and technically pleasing Welshman, he was always one step ahead of Warrington, winning and vacating titles that Warrington would then go on to claim himself. “The two of us started to get mentioned in the same conversations,” Warrington says. “People would ask who the best featherweight in Britain was. I’d hear it said all the time that Selby was miles ahead of me. ‘Warrington’s just a ticket-seller’. Selby said something like that himself.”
Warrington on the Elland Road pitch ahead of his fight vs Selby in 2018 (Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)
In 2015, Warrington was asked by Sky to provide punditry for a bout between Selby and Fernando Montiel, staged in Arizona. Warrington spent his time in the studio scribbling down notes and, at the end of the contest, explained the weaknesses he would target if he and Selby ever faced off. “Not long after, he said something along the lines of ‘I could write down all of Josh Warrington’s qualities on the back of a postage stamp’,” Warrington says. The needle between them started to balloon, amplifying until it peaked in the week leading up to their bout. None of the tension was fake or manufactured. Selby refused to see Warrington after the fight at Elland Road and the pair have not spoken since, save for a message Warrington sent Selby on social media to wish him well after he retired.
Most of the talk in the build-up to their Elland Road rumble was about the crowd. How would Selby cope with the atmosphere? Would it affect a skilled and hardened world champion? Selby made light of it in all of his pre-fight media commitments. At the final press conference, staged inside the ground’s West Stand, someone in the audience told him he would flake in the heat. “Don’t be silly,” Selby replied. He looked gaunt and it would transpire that he was battling to make the nine-stone featherweight limit, but Warrington had been told that Selby tended to bulk up in the hours after the weigh-in.
“He under-estimated me, massively,” Warrington says. “A lot of people did. Even people on my side, wanting me to win… I could tell they weren’t quite sure. There was that little bit of me that wasn’t sure either. We knew everything about Lee, but still, what if he’s actually what everyone says he is? What if he’s that good?
“My career was on the line. After everything that’s been said, after bringing the fight here to Elland Road, what if you lose?
“But that crowd made a difference. It definitely did. I don’t know Lee personally but he seems like a quiet man. We had an open training session in Leeds a few days before the fight and it was pretty raucous. I’m not a psychologist, but at the end of it, he seemed to want to get out of there as fast as he could. He wasn’t trying to lap it up or give it back. All I could think was, ‘If you’re not enjoying this, then wait until fight night because that will be a different level’.”
Warrington bagged the home dressing room at Elland Road, as he was always going to. The nuts and bolts of the stadium were familiar because when time allowed around training camps and fights, he was getting to as many Leeds games as he could. Bielsa was not on the scene quite yet but would arrive at the club the following moment, bringing with him one of the biggest cultural revolutions the club had ever seen.
Whether Bielsa ever watched Warrington, the featherweight cannot say, but he got the seal of approval from the Argentine shortly after beating Frampton around Christmas in 2018. “Leeds played Blackburn (on Boxing Day) and I went onto the pitch with my belt at half-time,” Warrington says. “I was back in the tunnel and he walked towards me with his head down. I assumed he’d just go past me, other things to think about. But then he saw me in his peripheral vision, grabbed me and shouted, ‘Champion, champion, champion!’. I get the biggest cuddle ever, he taps me on the back, gives me a thumbs up and then he’s gone.”
Warrington stayed at Oulton Hall the night before his bout with Selby, away from his family in what had become his usual routine. He had become a father to twins three months earlier, babies born on Valentine’s Day, and in that period “wasn’t as much of a dad as I wanted to be”. On the day of the fight itself, the enormity of the occasion gripped him. “I was really nervous,” Warrington says. “My mate popped into the hotel room and said, ‘It’s booming in Leeds. All the bars are rammed, your name’s getting chanted everywhere’. I don’t know why, but every turn of the wheel towards Elland Road, I felt more and more relaxed. By the time I got to the stadium, I felt like I could beat anyone. That’s all I had in my mind — there’s no way I’m losing tonight.”
Warren and those around Warrington had every base of the event covered. Lucas Radebe, the former Leeds United captain, was flown in from South Africa to join Warrington on his ring walk. The Kaiser Chiefs gave a live performance of Warrington’s long-established ring walk song, I Predict A Riot. Warrington can recount it step by step.
We’ve moved from outside Elland Road to a seat in the stadium’s East Stand, with a view of the tunnel on the far side of the pitch. Melting ice is dripping from the steelwork above us. It feels nothing like that scorching May day, but mentally, Warrington is back there.
“Every now and again, I’d hide in the tunnel to have a quick look at how things were building,” he says. “I didn’t want to interact with people too much but I had to try and soak it up. The adrenaline was making me yawn over and over again. It was a weird feeling because it’s the biggest night of your life and you look like you’re really tired. It was pure tension. I must have had about four nervous pisses.”
The last part of his routine before a fight was always to sit alone in a corner, taking a few minutes to think through the road behind him and everything that was to come. “It’s usually a really emotional moment, my heart going, all sorts flooding into my head,” he says. “But on that night, it didn’t come. None of that was there. You could cut the tension in the dressing room. My old man was there with a serious face, the only time he’s ever f***ing quiet. But I felt really calm.”
The transfer from dressing room to ring is something of a blur. Warrington remembers the noise as he came out of the tunnel — “f***ing deafening, I’m just trying to keep my eyes on the ring” — and Selby, the defending IBF champion, arriving second and taking his gown off. “I was told that he was a big featherweight, that he’d make me look like a little boy,” Warrington says. “Then he took his gown off and, well… I’d been sparring a lot with welterweights. I looked at him and I couldn’t see it. I just thought ‘I’ll destroy this man. I’ll go through him’.”
The sun had fallen and the atmosphere was nuclear. As the first bell sounded, there was a crackling realisation that this could be special, that Elland Road was on the edge of a night like no other. Warrington stepped out for the first round with a final instruction from O’Hagan ringing in his ear: “Nowt f***ing stupid…”
One of the tactics Warrington had spotted in Selby was his tendency to jab with his left hand, move to his right and then attempt to land a right hand as his opponent stepped forward. They had seen that method in numerous video clips and seen it work well. “It threw everyone off,” Warrington says. “But we had a game plan for it. Rather than go where he wanted me to go, move the opposite way and catch him. That’s what happened straight away. It couldn’t have worked any better.”
Warrington, by 2018, had a long and credible unbeaten record that stretched for 26 fights. He had been English, British, European and WBC International champion and there was no question that he was ready for a full world title tilt. The only doubt was about whether his talent would take him over that last hurdle. Warrington was no knockout specialist. His style was all-in, overwhelming appointments with pressure and work rate. Selby was rated as the slicker of the two.
But at Elland Road, the shape of the fight was perfect for Warrington. Selby was cut early on, a bloody mess but not injured badly enough for the contest to be stopped and ruled a technical draw.
Warrington set the pace in the opening rounds and Selby’s body language suggested that if any in the crowd had underestimated him, he might equally have underestimated them. “I’d been warned that he had a really good reach, but straight away I could feel my jab getting to him,” Warrington says. “It was like, ‘Have one of these. All right then, have another’. To be fair to Lee, I never felt like I was going to stop him at any stage, but I felt in control.”
Warrington vs Selby in the IBF Featherweight Championship fight at Elland Road (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Selby wasn’t able to find his rhythm or dictate the direction of the fight. The noise was maddening and the crowd could see which way the scorecards were heading.
In between rounds eight and nine, Warren jumped up to bang the ring apron and urged Warrington on, telling him the belt was there for the taking. O’Hagan tried to tell Warrington to ignore Warren, but for a minute or so, the realisation sank in. “In the next round I felt like a little boy again,” Warrington says. “It was surreal. You’re at Elland Road in front of 20,000. You’re about to win the world title.
“I’m thinking about it all, how it got to this. But then I hear my dad going mad in the background, telling me to switch on. He wasn’t having that with a few rounds to go.”
At the final bell, there was no doubt, even when a split decision was called. Selby knew and despite the bad blood beforehand, gave Warrington a tap on the chest and said “fair play”. The previous evening, Warrington had committed the some would say cardinal sin of getting into the ring and running through the emotion of how it would feel if the result went his way.
There is a photograph of him on his knees celebrating with his arms raised, as if he has got the decision; like kissing the Champions League trophy before the final has even kicked off. “I just wanted to visualise everything,” he says. “And 24 hours later, that’s how it was.”
He could hardly bring himself to leave the ring. A routine drug test forced him down eventually and security staff around him were strict in reminding him not to touch the hands of anyone reaching out to him from the crowd — just in case of contamination. Elland Road was alive and in its element, a tough old stadium made for spit-and-sawdust sport. And then, little by little, it emptied, thousands drifting into the night. Later, as the ring was dismantled, Warrington stood in the West Stand and watched for five minutes, silent and reflective. It dawned on him then what he understands now: that no experience was likely to top it.
Warrington likes to think that the energy of that night was comparable with the energy brought to Leeds by Bielsa; that both helped to wake the city up. Warrington accepts that he will not fight at Elland Road again. That time and that window has passed. But he is not melancholy about it either, or not yet, because he is not ready to let go of his career.
Around the time of his wins over Selby and Frampton — a time when he would have been Ring magazine’s fighter of the year had the Frampton fight not arrived too late for the voting — Warrington spoke about retiring when he was 30, of enjoying what boxing had given him and avoiding the pitfall of not knowing when to get out.
The Covid-19 pandemic held him back at his peak, denying him the bucket-list dream of a bout in the U.S. He has fought seven times since then and has lost his last two contests, the most recent in October after succumbing to a brutal combination from Leigh Wood.
Before Wood put those punches together, Warrington looked like the Warrington of 2018: sharp, intense, dominant. But what came his way was a punishing defeat at the age of 33. His wife, Natasha, always thought of him as invincible. Warrington helped her to think that way and so did his results. “As I’ve got older, she’s admitted some home truths,” he says. “She didn’t say this at the time, but the Selby fight took her to a different place.
“I talked about retiring at 30, so I’m three years into my overdraft, but it scares me to death. I’ve never had that moment where I’ve thought I’m done. I want to go out on my terms.”
In 2019, Warrington was invited to the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year ceremony in Aberdeen. He bumped into the jockey AP McCoy who, after the most distinguished career in horse racing, called it a day in 2015. Warrington asked McCoy what retirement was like, fishing for some useful insight. “He just looked into my soul, shook his head and walked away,” Warrington says. “I turned to Tash (his partner, Natasha) and said, ‘F***ing hell, I don’t want to feel like that!’.”
Which, ultimately, is why boxers go on and why jockeys keep racing in their forties and why Bielsa might coach until the day he dies. What follows after? What if nothing fills the void?
At the start of this interview, Warrington admitted that the Wood defeat was sending him up and down mentally, creating days where he felt enthused about his performance and days where he felt low about the shots that put him away. He wants a rematch with Wood and they are talking seriously about a bout at the City Ground; a stadium fight, Nottingham vs Leeds, something akin to May 2018.
Already, Warrington has the guarantee that he will go down as one of Leeds’ greatest sportspeople, an athlete who gave the city one of its greatest sporting nights. History will remember that, whatever happens now, but the willingness to write his career’s epitaph isn’t there. “Because those nights,” he says, pointing to the centre of the Elland Road pitch. “When they’re gone, they don’t come back.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
