Mark Heffron became a British champion at the third attempt as he stopped Lennox Clarke for the super-middleweight title at the Copper Box in London.

Heffron was stopped by Liam Williams in 2018 and then pulled out due to a nasty looking eye injury against Denzel Bentley in 2020, both at middleweight, Heffron made no mistake one weight up as he took the fight to Clarke and won a thriller. He won the Commonwealth title and a minor IBF belt for good measure.

The Manchester fighter looked on the verge of forcing the stoppage in the first, but Clarke withstood the onslaught and came back well in the second and was bitterly disappointed to lose the title.

Clarke had been making the first defence of the title he won with a sensational stoppage of Willy Hutchinson at the same venue 16 months ago.

He endured a torrid first round, as Heffron landed repeatedly with hard, short hooks. Clarke was rocked consistently, as Heffron could not miss, but somehow he stayed uptight.

The minute’s rest seemed to do wonders for Clarke, though, as he came out to take the fight to Heffron in the second, as he began to walk through Heffron’s punches.

Things swung again in the third, which Heffron dominated, beating Clarke to the punch and then rocking him with a big right uppercut and a chopping right hook, which almost turned him around.

Early in the fourth round, Clarke landed a huge left hook, but Heffron got back on top and a series of body punches, culminating in a big left hook, had Clarke backing off. Heffron then landed a one-two straight down the pipe.

Heffron kept in the pressure at the start of the fifth round and when one left hook staggered Clarke back to the ropes, Heffron pounced, landing two more hard head punches before referee Bob Williams jumped in to stop it at 2:28.

Clarke was furious, though, as he twice pushed Williams and then shoved Heffron as he ran around the ring in celebration.

It was a difficult call, Clarke had taken plenty of heavy shots and been rocked, but he had generally shrugged them off. There were some boos in the arena. You could understand the frustration of Clarke, for whom becoming British champion had meant so much, but you could also appreciate Williams’s view.

Ron Lewis is a senior writer for BoxingScene. He was Boxing Correspondent for The Times, where he worked from 2001-2019 - covering four Olympic Games and numerous world title fights across the globe. He has written about boxing for a wide variety of publications worldwide since the 1980s.