Nick Ball may have won the respect of the boxing world but the unbeaten featherweight will board his flight home from Saudi Arabia without the prize he really wanted; the WBC featherweight title.

If long time champion Rey Vargas shaded the first half of Friday’s title fight, Ball dominated the second.

The 27-year-old Liverpudlian walked through some solid body shots and steadily ramped up the pace and pressure as the rounds passed. He also dropped the much taller Mexican in the eighth and 11th rounds. 

Vargas never fully unravelled but once the momentum of the fight had turned against him, he found it all but impossible to reverse it. 

At the final bell, there seemed to be only one winner. Instead, Ball had to settle for a majority draw. The scorecards varied wildly. One judge had Ball winning clearly, 116-110, another scored the fight 114-112 for Vargas while the third judge couldn’t separate them and handed in a 113-113 card. 

“The reaction of the crowd said it all. The boos were cascading down from the top. I don’t think anyone was happy with that decision,” Ball’s trainer Paul Stevenson told Boxing Now. “This is what’s wrong with boxing a lot of the time. You get a close, hard fight but the clear emergence of someone new. You have to kill the king to become the king. He does everything that’s asked of him and more and wins clearly in the eyes of most.

“Some of those scorecards are all over the place. The referee – I don’t know where they’ve got him from but I wouldn’t like to see him again. It’s very frustrating to say the least.”

While Stevenson was obviously frustrated and disappointed by the scorecards, he also wanted to draw attention to the performance of the referee, Giovanni Poggi.

It is said that a good referee should barely be noticed but Poggi played a major role in the fight. Some of his warnings were justified – the shoulder throw Ball landed on Vargas in the early rounds almost won him the fight by ippon – but the Italian official prevented Ball from working when he got inside Vargas’ long arms and generally seemed extremely receptive to the Mexican veteran’s complaints and histrionics from the opening bell.

The short, powerful Ball (19-01, 11 KOs) knew that he would have to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Vargas (36-1-1, 22 KOs) at every opportunity and although he bullied, pushed and rough-housed the 33-year-old, he generally did a good job of keeping his attacks on the right side of legal. 

Vargas is an experienced, world-class operator and may still have banked those early rounds even had Ball been allowed to impose himself, but he would have had to work much harder to do so. Given the way Ball finished, the scorecards may even have been rendered irrelevant. 

“I spoke to the referee when he came round to give the pre-fight instructions,” Stevenson revealed. “I said we had a tall opponent who is going to want to box and move. Please give Nick the opportunity to work inside before you jump in and break the fight. Straight away he was very dismissive of it and when the fight happened, as soon as they got close – like I knew he would because I could tell by his body language before – he was right in there. 

“I don’t like to slag him [Vargas] off because he’s a world champion but I was disappointed in the way he carried himself. Throwing himself on the floor and complaining constantly. I don’t think he conducted himself as a champion and he goes home with the belt and not Nick. We’d love that rematch.”