HE still doesn’t quite have a world title to call his own. But 2018 was the year Josh Taylor entered boxing’s big league.

The self-styled Tartan Tornado’s unanimous points win against the dangerous Ukrainian Viktor Postol at the SSE Hydro in June will go down forever as one of the biggest red-letter days in the recent history of Scottish boxing, enough to see him voted to take over from none other than Anthony Joshua as BBBofC figher of the year and unlock his path to the big fights of the future.

Having taken care of Ryan Martin of the USA on his World Boxing Super Series (WBSS), the first one of them will be his maiden bona fide title shot, when he takes on Ivan Baranchyk of Belarus, most likely in early February and quite possibly back in Glasgow.

Taylor had plenty of kudos in the bank as the year began, after those 2017 knockouts of Ohara Davies and Miguel Vazquez. There was the disappointment of seeing his prospective opponent and former three-weight world champion Humberto Soto calling off from a scheduled March contest to be replaced by the hapless Winston Campos, who the Scot had on the canvas three times before the fight was stopped early in the third round.

But the gloves were off when it came to Postol, a Bond villain look-alike who had reached the age of 34 with a solitary defeat on his resume, to a man in Terence Crawford who is considered one of the all-time greats of the sport. He had never been stopped in regulation. He still hasn’t.

He was also able to give Taylor the more uncomfortable evening of his pro career, showing his experience to commandeer the centre of the ring and rocking the Scot with a couple of straight right hands in the seventh round. But the Scot dug deeper than he has had to before and came out the other end.

A three-round blitz in the eighth, ninth and tenth re-asserted his authority, with a left hook in the latter sending the Ukrainian to the canvas and subjecting him to an eight-count before the safety of the bell intervened.

By Taylor’s admission, the scorecards in his favour at the end (119-108, 118-110, 117-110) were a tad one-sided but that was a detail. As he motioned to his beaten opponent the offer to take him for a pint once they had both been cleaned up, Taylor knew that he had just recorded one of the defining wins of his career.

“He hurt me in the seventh round, and I had to adjust to his game plan,” said Taylor. “But despite that I felt great. I knew I could do 12 rounds, I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. I’m on the verge of my dream of fighting for a world title. That was playing on my mind a bit in the build-up. I was trying a wee bit too hard in the early rounds, it took time to start relaxing, but I adapted.”

While the win supposedly ensured a mandatory shot at Jose Carlos Ramirez’s WBC belt, nothing ever runs smoothly in boxing. It was announced shortly afterwards that the Scot had accepted a lucrative offer to enter the second season of the WBSS instead, the ‘Champions League’ style event where eight of the best fighters in each selected weight class battle it out for the Muhammad Ali trophy.

Having knocked out the disappointing Ryan Martin in his quarter-final, next up in the semi-finals is Baranchyk, the new IBF champion, who will also put his belt on the line. With the possibility of super fights with Regis Prograis and perhaps even Ramirez still to come, Taylor’s pathway is suddenly marked out, the standard bearer for a burgeoning sport in Scotland.

Another young man in a hurry is his stablemate Lee McGregor, who covets the British bantamweight belt recently won by his countryman Kash Farooq, while a raft of new Scottish pros such as Willy Hutchinson, John Docherty, Reece McFadden also promise great things. Ricky Burns’ recent dismissal of Scotty Cardle suggests he still has something in the tank and even the 41-year-old Scott Harrison will be back in the ring in the New Year.