Injury forces Russell to consider short term future

Kemahl 'The Hitman' Russell's camp says that he has been offered three fights since his loss to Sergiy Derevyanchenko but he may have to turn them down.

Russell's manager, Leiza-Mae Keane, said that the boxer is now recovering from a cut he received in his bout in Mississippi last week, and as a result, will be out of action for the next few months.

Russell lost in the fifth round of his bout with Derevyanchenko and Keane said that despite losing, he gave what she describes as a good showing in front of promoters who felt keen on working with him after.

"Sometimes you have to take a calculated risk like we did with Kemahl," she said. "We thought 'you can win this fight and you can lose this fight,' but we took the risk because the opportunity for Kemahl to fight on television."

Keane said that one of the biggest challenges Russell had was inactivity. "Kemahl went to America (ranked) at 40 in the world but fell to 99 because of inactivity. So now No. 99 in the world takes on No. 5 in the world - do you know how that happened? Nobody wanted to fight Sergiy and nobody wanted to fight Kemahl. This is how that match was made. Kemahl dominated two out of the four rounds and Sergiy dominated two - it was an even fight until Kemahl got a cut at the end of Round Four."

HUGE FIGHT

This cut is what Keane said cost Russell the bout as the cutman had not done an effective enough job of closing it and the boxer's visibility was affected soon after.

"These three fights are fights we would love to take - perfect opponents, the ones who would never say yes to fighting him," Keane said. "But this cut he has may limit how he can train for another 30 days. So the dates of the fights which fall in May could pose a problem, and we may have to turn them down."

Russell will be returning to Jamaica shortly and will be linking up with his trainer, Carly Carew, to rebound from his first professional loss.

"He will be training as planned. If Russell won the fight last week, we would not have allowed him to fight until June as the magnitude of the fight was huge. He would have had to rest and reset and then we step down a bit for his next two fights.

"You see, we don't just jump up and make decisions. It's all calculated primarily to the benefit of the boxers involved."