IN light of the fact Denzel Bentley knew about a potential fight in Las Vegas against WBO beltholder Janibek Alimkhanuly two weeks before his last fight, you could be forgiven for thinking the aggressive approach he adopted against Marcus Morrison in September was the result of impatience.
Urgent, authoritative and, in the end, clinical, the British middleweight champion certainly carried the demeanour of a man on a mission that night, though insists this was merely the style necessary for that particular opponent. It wasn’t, he insists, influenced by what he knew was on the horizon.
“It was almost two weeks before the Morrison fight [that he got the news of a potential Alimkhanuly fight],” Bentley told. “If I had found out a couple of days before fight week, I think it would have been on my mind more. But because I heard about it a long time before that, I was able to have a week thinking about it and then I had fight week concentrating only on Morrison, who is no joke. I could push it to the back of my mind a little bit.
