THERE are many things that Stephen Simmons loves about being Scottish. The 32-year-old is deeply patriotic and would not dream of entering the ring without his trademark blue-and-white shorts. But there is one thing the cruiserweight finds intensely frustrating about being born north of the border; the lack of title fights he gets offered in comparison to the opportunities he believes he would have been afforded were he English.

“This is my sixth year as a pro and I feel like I should have more titles but when you come from Scotland, it’s a whole lot harder than when you come from England,” he said. “Being Scottish has definitely held me back and made it much more difficult for me to get big fights because all the big promoters are English and we just don’t have any of those big promoters up here.”

The Edinburgh fighter turned professional at the start of 2011 having won a bronze medal at the previous year’s Commonwealth Games but, from that point, his career has been somewhat stop-start. He went unbeaten in his first 11 fights, picking up the Celtic cruiserweight title WBC International Silver cruiserweight titles on his way. However, 2015 saw Simmons suffer his first loss and from there, he has endured a frustrating spell, fighting only five times in the past two years.

Things are looking up for the man nicknamed “Monster”, though. He takes on Latvian journeyman, Arturs Kulikauskis, tonight at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Glasgow in what the Scot hopes will be the first step towards a much bigger fight this summer. “I’m feeling good and I’ve been training really hard for the past six to eight weeks. If I don’t have a date set to fight, I find it really difficult to train my absolute hardest but as soon as I’ve got a date, I up it to a different level and that’s what I’ve done the past few months.” Simmons said. “I’m looking forward to the fight because he’ll come and have a go – he isn’t afraid which is the type of opponent I want. There’s nothing worse than being up against someone who’s tucking up and just trying to survive – that doesn’t get the best out of me. You get the best out of me when I’m in a real fight.”

Physically, Simmons is in the best shape he’s ever been but mentally, it’s been a topsy-turvy seven months. Last October, he took on the highly rated German fighter, Noel Gevor, in Hamburg for the WBO International cruiserweight title and lost on a split decision. It was, said many observers, the best performance of his pro career but Simmons admits that the defeat took some time to get over.

“Going into that fight, I was so confident,” he recalled. “I’d had a great camp and had boxed just a couple of weeks before so when I got the call to go to Germany, I bit their hand off for that opportunity and I thought – this is my time. I thought I’d clearly won the fight and in the ring afterwards, I was so gutted. If I’d won, I’d have been the mandatory challenger for a world title so it would have been huge for me. It took a few days for the result to sink in and when I was back home, I got a bit depressed about it to be honest. Especially when I was coming into the new year, my wife was having to pick me up all the time and was telling me that I needed to get back in the gym and to get back out running because I just wasn’t doing any of that.”

However, once Simmons had got over the crushing disappointment of losing, he realised how many positives could be taken from his impressive display against Gevor and as he targets a title fight later this year. “That fight in Germany was a big confidence boost because it showed me how well I could box,” Simmons said. “It made me realise that if I get the right length of time to prepare, I can go into the ring with the highest calibre of fighter and I know I can win. I feel like I’ve always had that standard of performance in me, it was just a case of getting the right fights and I feel like I’ve stepped up a level recently.

"Originally, I didn’t want a six-round fight tonight, I just wanted to go straight to a title fight. But my team reckon it’s in my best interest to get rid of the cobwebs with a fight like this one before I go for a title fight later in the year and there’s no better way to do that than being in a real fight.”