By Shaun Brown
It’s now getting to the stage where Edinburgh’s Craig McEwan has had more fights fall through than he’s actually been involved in since his thrilling tenth round stoppage loss to Andy Lee.
“I was due to fight the Cuban kid, [Erislandy] Lara at light middleweight. That was going somewhere and it fell through. I then got an e-mail asking if I’d fight Alfredo Angulo but that fell through too,” McEwan explained.
Despite the continuous setbacks one piece of good news has managed to filter through all the misery, McEwan is now training with one of Britain’s leading trainers in Billy Nelson. And it doesn’t appear to have been too much of a wrench to leave the A-list surroundings of Freddie Roach’s Wildcard Gym.
“The gym’s full of superstars and I was getting shunted down the list. Getting any time to work with Freddie was sometimes non-existent. I could have stayed in the gym and hid but I decided to come back to Scotland. Billy got in touch with me and I’m now training with him in Glasgow. We’re working hard, training hard and that’s something I never got in the Wildcard,” said the 19-1 (10) Scot.
As it has been for the majority of 2011, the 29-year-old continues to play a waiting game in the hope a fight can be made before too long. After all the plaudits for his performance, in defeat, against Andy Lee (who fights this weekend) back in March it did seem like the offers may finally begin to flood in. With quite the opposite occurring, the possibility of a co-promotional deal was also explored.
“My deal with Golden Boy expires next June. We did look at working with Frank Warren so he could co-promote with them but nothing happened. They do tell me, ‘we’re trying hard for you, we see plenty of potential’ – so I don’t know if it’s because HBO aren’t interested or what. They have to get me a fight soon or they’ll owe me something.”