Ricky Burns will defend his World Boxing Organization lightweight title against America's Terence Crawford at the SECC in Glasgow on March 1.
Confirming details of the bout yesterday, Alex Morrison, the Scot's manager, dismissed rumours that the broken right jaw Burns suffered against Mexican Raymundo Beltran three months ago is taking longer than anticipated to heal. The 30-year-old has until March 7 to make a mandatory defence under WBO rules or forfeit the title he has held for two years.
Promoter Eddie Hearn had hoped to stage a groundbreaking showdown at the 12,000-capacity SSE Hydro Arena in Glasgow, which he had provisionally booked for February 8, but the venue is unavailable for the later date after Hearn decided to put the fight back three weeks to give Burns the maximum amount of time possible to make a complete recovery.
Burns underwent surgery to have a titanium plate fitted to hold his jaw in place immediately after the fourth defence of his title, which ended in a controversial draw against Beltran, but he was cleared by his doctors last week to resume sparring.
Morrison said: "Ricky won't start sparring until January purely as a precaution. But he has been back training for the last couple of weeks and everything is going well.
"The injury is more psychological than anything, but Ricky is strong mentally and once he gets hit on his jaw I know he will be fine."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article