“The boys don’t like each other” – Dennis Hogan promoter predicts Jimmy Kelly sell-out

DDP Promotions go into only their second ever promotion gifted with a fight that sells itself.

The fledgeling promotional company headed by Dubliner Paul Keegan hopes to put on a massive show on Saturday April 7th in Brisbane, and they seem to believe a clash between Dennis Hogan and Jimmy Kelly [23(9)-1(1)] makes their job easy.

The WBO light middleweight title eliminator will see Kildare’s Hogan [26(7)-1(0)-1] looking to boost his #4 ranking and take the WBO Inter-Continental belt from the organisation’s #5,

Keegan suggests two fighters that don’t like each other fighting to keep their World title hopes alive is a promoter’s dream. Additionally, he points to the Irish versus English aspect as something that could excite Down Under.

“Kelly is interesting and loves to mouth off which is great for the show, sometimes I see promoters trying to build up a rivalry we honestly haven’t had to do a thing. The boys don’t like each other, full stop,” Keegan told Irish-Boxing.com.

“This is a huge fight and will have massive ramifications. What this fight will do is push one lad closer to the winner of [Liam] Smith versus [Sadam] Ali. The loser will have to take a good look at themselves and where they go from there, so to me this is a massive fight,” he added before predicting a sell-out at the Brisbane Convention Centre.

“I believe this event will sell out. We have a massive Irish community in Australia but there is also a huge English community here so that rivalry is always there and you add Australian boxing fans into the mix this will be brilliant.”

“I’d plead with any Irish person based in Australia is get behind Dennis, get to Brisbane and let’s show the world we get behind our boxers. It’s not very often you have a true 50/50 fight and an Ireland vs England fight so close when you are living this side of the world.”

The fight which tops the ‘Revolution’ card was being billed as a de-facto final eliminator, but Keegan confirms it hasn’t been officially granted that status by the WBO.

Kelly and Hogan are ranked #5 and #4 respectively with mandatory challenger Smith at #1 and Kanat Islam and Magomed Kurbanov at #2 and #3.

Kurbanov, especially, is keen on moving toward a WBO shot and is also in contention to take over the mandatory spot from Smith. However, DDP Sports believe the fact their man is in against a fellow top five fighter should be taken into account.

Indeed the promotional outfit who held talks with Team Kurbanov will be pushing for Hogan to be confirmed as next in line for the title if he emerges victorious in 11 weeks time.

“A win here and we will be pressuring the WBO to announce that Dennis is next,” Keegan continued.

“In my opinion Kurbanov wanted nothing to do with Dennis. I think they will try and fight somebody in the Top 15 so they can try and stay in that #2 slot.”

“On the other hand, you have Dennis and our mentality of ‘lets gets the highest ranked guys we can and beat them’.”