Hearn working on a big fight for Walker

Still champ…Walker with the belt. Pic: Mark Robinson/Matchroom Boxing

PROMOTER Eddie Hearn has promised something big for British welterweight champ Conah Walker.

It is a deserved reward for the Wolverhampton warrior’s chilling destruction of Liam Taylor on the huge BP Pulse Live arena show on Saturday.

What Matchroom boss Hearn has up his sleeve is yet unknown. Walker, a sawn-off, snarling bundle of fighting fury, wants a slice of the lucrative Saudi boxing scene. He has earned it, the 30-year-old insisted.

“I feel I’m ready to push on to European and world level,” Walker told me. “I believe in myself and believe I have the will, grit and determination.

“I’d like to win the British title outright, but it’s not top of the list. I think I deserve to headline a big show and Eddie Hearn is on the job. He’s said he’s working on something special for me.”

Taylor has joined the list of opponents sucked into the relentless meat-grinder that is Conah Walker, chewed-up, then spat out.

A left hook in the seventh finally finished the 34-year-old on the Birmingham super-show, referee Bob Williams waving it off after 45 seconds of the session.

The shot was short and spectacular, but the fight had been relentlessly, clinically dislodged from the brave challenger. Like a steak, Taylor was tenderised in the proceeding rounds before Walker applied the final cut.

By the end, Taylor’s nose was broken and his eyes swollen. He gave it his all.

He dug deep, showed real heart and had pockets of success, particularly with right hands in the fifth. Liam, like those before, discovered a boxer can have his moments against Walker, subduing him is quite another matter.

He’s like a brush fire. Just when it appears the inferno has been beaten down, it rages again.

Walker, defending his Lonsdale Belt for the first time, made him pay for that limited success in the fifth by upping the tempo in the sixth and delivering one sickening left hook to the body.

It was clear the end was nigh.

“It was all part of the plan,” Walker said of Taylor’s moments. “The plan was to pull all the energy out of him. I knew he was going to start fast, but not many can hold my pace. He boxed at my pace and that doesn’t take much out of me. When you’re the one dictating the action it’s an easy night’s work.”

There is, Conah pledged, even better to come.

He added: “I’m always striving to get better. The day you stop improving is the day you have to look at yourself and think hard about your future.”