DEVON ALEXANDER TKO end of 8 JUNIOR WITTER

After all his talk about Ricky Hatton running scared, and how he would destroy Amir Khan in three rounds, Junior Witter now looks very foolish after his eight rounds corner retirement against Devon Alexander in Saturday’s fight for the vacant WBC super lightweight title on Showtime. If a fighter talks the talk it becomes incumbent upon him to walk the walk, which Witter didn’t do.

Look, I know that Witter got knocked around a bit and apparently suffered an elbow injury. He suffered a cut over the right eye and a cut lip, and he did well to survive the fifth round, when a left hand from Alexander’s southpaw stance had the veteran from Sheffield, central England, hanging on desperately. Witter was in a fight he couldn’t win, and his trainer, Dominic Ingle, did the compassionate thing in pulling the plug: he didn’t want to see his man hurt and humiliated in the last four rounds.

All this I understand.

However, if a fighter verbally trashes his fellow fighters, and sets himself up as their superior, he really has to be prepared, more so than other, less-outspoken boxers, to grit it out when things get really tough. It sort of goes with the territory, don’t you think?

Witter’s surrender was at least as embarrassing for British boxing fans as Clinton Woods’s 12 rounds of getting treated like a sparring partner by Antonio Tarver, probably more so, because at least Woods took his lumps for the full distance.

By the eighth round the commentary by Showtime’s Gus Johnson was comparing Witter’s performance to the much-decried 12 rounds of survival with Zab Judah nine years ago. Johnson and analyst Al Bernstein were dumbfounded when the Witter corner ran up the white flag. Bernstein showed almost a diplomatic quality in the restraint of his comments — others might have been far more cruel.

This was not the first surprising retirement from a fight in ring history, but Witter had been building himself up so much that the fall was harder than most.

Witter had the moral courage to grant inquisitor Jim Gray a dressing-room interview, and the British boxer looked so crestfallen — near to tears — that it would have to be a hardhearted individual who did not feel a pang of sympathy. It was a dreadful night for Witter. He was being bullied and outfought by a younger, stronger opponent in nearly every round, and his hands-down lunges, wild hooks and swings and the constant switching from orthodox to southpaw and back again were never likely to confuse the smart, disciplined and determined Alexander.

While I picked Alexander to win I must admit that I thought this was a fight he could lose. It all hinged, I thought, on which version of the erratic Witter turned up — the unorthodox but dangerous fighter who staved off Lovemore Ndou and destroyed Vivian Harris, or the one who struggled against Colin Lynes and Andreas Kotelnik and then lost in desultory fashion to Timothy Bradley.

What we got was an uncertain, unhappy and in the end unwilling fighter, and I suspect he might now be wishing he hadn’t showed up at all.