In the immediate aftermath of Carl Frampton’s somewhat sub-par American debut, some people directed a large portion of the blame to his young trainer, Shane McGuigan. Some pointed to the dangers of having such an inexperienced coach at world level, and questioned whether he could handle the pressure at the top level.

As an aside, irish-boxing.com disagrees with these opinions, instead viewing Shane McGuigan’s performance in El Paso as, probably, the most encouraging aspect of the whole night.

Writing in his weekly column for the Belfast Telegraph’s Sunday Life, ‘The Jackal’ has leapt to the defence of his much maligned trainer.

The Tiger’s Bay boxer, to a degree, is baffled that “a lot of people just don’t seem to get how good a trainer he is, they don’t seem to be able to get past the fact that he is a young coach at 26 — but he’s one of the best coaches in the world now.”

Frampton is full of praise for the Ulster senior champion-turned professional, believing that “Shane has improved me as a fighter and he’s probably the youngest in the history of the sport to train a world champion and when he gets to 40 years of age he’ll have a list of world champions that he’ll be able to read out — I’ve no doubt.”

On McGuigan’s performance on that dramatic night in Texas, Frampton noted that “I know some thought that when I got into a crisis Shane, because he’s seen as young and inexperienced, may have panicked but look what happened — I had the worst possible start, down twice and when I went back to the corner Shane was very calm and we got through it.”

“Shane proved that he can handle a crisis and for me, that really was a crisis.”