Matthew Macklin had a successful return to light middleweight at the weekend. Fighting Jason Welborn, The Tipperary Tornado overcame the storm brought by the Wolverhampton warrior to win the WBC International title.

It was however an imperfect performance by the three-time World title challenge who was expected to blow away the challenge of the unheralded Welborn, yet was dragged into something of a war at the Birmingham Arena – winning on the cards after a hard ten rounds.

Speaking to IFL TV directly after the bout, Macklin responded to any criticism, reasoning that “there are a million thing that can cause a good or a bad performance – did you do the weight? did you train hard? did you overtrain? did you get good sparring? were you up for it mentally?”

“Was it a ten out of ten performance? Definitely not, but I won a fight against a kid who was super up for it – first real fight I’ve had in over a year, the other two were just blowouts.”

“There were a lot of negatives, and a lot of positives. I’ll weigh it all up in the weeks to come.”

“A win’s a win, I’d rather win badly than lose goodly. It wasn’t the worst performance in the world.”

“It wasn’t vintage, of course it wasn’t, but I did some nice things, blocking shots, rolling, but when you’re working on new things you’re not gonna be ten out of ten straight away.”

Watch the interview in full below

Photo Credit – Ricardo Guglielminotti – The Fighting Irish @ThefIrish