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I don't want to boast, but I've got a reason for boasting: I was in living room yesterday. And he wasn't selling anything.

The , who's seen a fair bit in sport, says he's never seen 'access' like it. If you only follow Premiership football, you might not know what he means. The point is, Premiership footballers only speak nowadays if they've got something to flog. Ricky, on the other hand, just wanted to chat.

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"He was like a bar of soap," is how Ricky Hatton described Paulie Malignaggi following at the MGM Grand. A bottle of Fairy Liquid might have been more apt. Paulie's hands were that soft.

Which is to take nothing away from Hatton's performance. The Manchester fighter said he'd be back to his best. And he was.

Even Hatton thought he might be past it following at the same venue last December and

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"I thought you Brits were supposed to be kind of reserved," said Pamela, as a middle-aged man in a Manchester City shirt crept up behind us and drenched us with dribble.

Alas, Pamela, the days when rakish types roamed the casinos of Vegas, melting the hearts of the locals with their refined English wit, died out with crushed velvet tuxedos.

Not that the casino owners will be bemoaning this cultural shift. Hatton fans can drink, well, like Hatton, and the bars of the MGM Grand were a seething mass of northern manhood long before Friday afternoon's equally seething weigh-in.

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It's the question on every journalist's lips at the MGM Grand: just how much has Ricky Hatton got left in the tank? But not even Hatton knows the answer to that one.

If you'd stuck a dipstick down Hatton's neck following , you'd almost certainly have discovered he'd been running on fumes.

The 30-year-old claims he was suffering from a serious chest infection, and that may be the case. But the truth is, since his , Hatton has rarely looked entirely convincing.

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"When Cotto broke your jaw it took time to recoup, when Hitman breaks your jaw you'll be sucking on soup." Not exactly , but to be fair, what did Wordsworth know about mitt work?

You'd have thought Ricky Hatton, a man who is one dodgy performance away from hanging up his gloves, needs a rapping trainer like a moose needs a hat stand*, but isn't just a rapping trainer. He's "the poet laureate of boxing".

And poet laureates of boxing have a habit of getting up opponents' noses, as anybody familiar with the career of , who held the office between 1960 and 1981, will recognise.

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Monte Barrett was flat on his back before his opponent had even left his dressing room. David Haye was good, but he wasn't that good. Maybe Monte wanted to get acclimatised.

For it was a position the New Yorker would adopt frequently as the evening wore on - six times in all, if you include his ill-advised ring entrance.

liked to be lowered into the ring on a magic carpet. Barrett looked like he'd been blasted out of a cannon. After four and a half rounds of heavy shelling from Haye, he looked like he wanted to climb back in.

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It's been a bad week for the old guys - first , and now In both cases, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to predict the result.

What did the fight at Madison Square Garden in the early hours of Sunday morning prove? That Joe Calzaghe is one of the greatest fighters Britain has ever produced and that Jones' best days are long behind him. But then most of us knew that already.

What it did reveal is that the pride of Newbridge, still blowing like a whirlwind at the age of 36, has got plenty left in the tank. What price a swansong at Cardiff's next summer? I'll lay you 2-1.

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"Bring back promoters," cracked a weary British journalist as he joined the rather unruly weigh-in outside a side entrance on Friday afternoon.

Sports hacks, accustomed as they are to wafting aside paying punters and marching into venues with nothing more than a regal flash of their credentials, can turn into rather precious loves when asked to stand in line.

But there can be no denying it has been a bitty old build-up to with nothing super about the promotional side of things.

Indeed, there has emerged an overall impression this week that we'd be hearing the words "what fight?" a lot less if - whisper this quietly - Don King had been in charge,

And one of the abiding memories will be the sight of venerable on the blower in the press room at the Marriott Marquis Hotel with nothing but an unlit cigar for company. It must have seemed like his world had ended.

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Don't mention Joe Calzaghe's 'legacy' to his trainer and father Enzo. The chances are he'll return fire with righteous anger, some very fruity language and the assertion that his son's legacy was assured many years ago.

Yet there are those who feel the outcome of at Madison Square Garden in the early hours of Sunday morning will define how future generations view the Welshman's career.

It seems a strange thing to say about someone who is undefeated in 45 professional fights, a man who made 21 defences of his WBO super-middleweight crown, a man who some still believe to be top of the pound-for-pound tree. To Enzo, it's bordering on treasonous.

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I don't know what , that great chronicler of the underworld, would have made of the city today. I'm not sure he was a frappucino kind of guy.

But he might still recognise - one of the few surviving icons of New York boxing's "Golden Age" - if not its clientele.

There were no Good Time Charleys or Dave the Dudes in Gleason's on Wednesday night, although there was a Kevin the Insurance Broker working the mitts with frightening purpose.

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