Maccarinelli growing into his role as a world champion

About the only cruiserweight unhappy that the limit for the division moved up from 13st 8lb to 14st 4lb a couple of years ago was Enzo Maccarinelli. Despite being 6ft 4in, he made the weight easily. But the 27-year-old WBO champion if filling out. Since switching trainers from Charlie Pearson to Enzo Calzaghe two years ago, Maccarinelli has filled out and is no longer the skinny guy who went into his training camp already on the limit.

"Slowly, I'm having to watch my weight and watch what I eat a bit more," Maccarinelli said, "but I'm not starving myself. If you watch some of my old weigh-ins, I've always got shorts on and in the pockets there are a couple of phones, keys, wallet just to get up to the weight. Now I have to watch what I eat.

"The training I do is very intense, 14 or 15 rounds per days at a fast pace, every day. But normally it’s after sprints or a run, so first five or six rounds I feel terrible.

"Before I was with Enzo [Calzaghe], if I was having a bad day in the gym, I'd quit. I was on my own. I hit the bag on my own, I'd watch the stopwatch myself, I'd run by myself. Charlie was only there some of the time and there came a point where I needed a change.

"In the first fight against [Mark] Hobson, I totally under-estimated him and it was only my fighting heart that got me through. I thought I was going to blow him away and I nearly did in the third round. But he survived and I’d never experienced that before and I wasn’t prepared.

"Now, in every training session, I put everything I've got into it. At the end I'm often flat out on the floor, dead to the world, that's how much I put into it."