Is it time to ban boxing?

This year, as almost every year, there have been calls for a complete ban on boxing. Two fighters, Ardi Ndembo and Sherif Lawal, have died as a result of the sport since April, with more than twenty meeting the same end in the last decade alone. Steve Bunce, BBC’s ‘voice of boxing’, seemed in a recent interview to encapsulate the central dilemma: ‘I’ve been in waiting rooms, I’ve been there when doctors have told loved ones that their son, husband and father has died. Nobody in their right mind is going to defend that.’

But as Bunce pointed out, the sport – often a million miles from the grotesque mismatch we witnessed between Tyson and Jake Paul earlier this morning – can also redeem apparently hopeless lives; those straightforwardly against it may ‘have no understanding what it’s like to grow up, in the case of Jimmy Murray, in a tenement on the outskirts of Glasgow.