Dylan Cleaver: Revill's sniping gives own game a black eye

Parker might have reached a peak, but there are much higher ones to scale. But the Parker camp should not be in a rush. Photo / Photosport

Dylan Cleaver has seen plenty of strengths and a couple of work-ons for Joe Parker, our newly-anointed WBO heavyweight world champion.

Boxing, eh? When the end of the fight just signals the start of another, even dirtier, one.

Joseph Parker didn't have much time to revel in the glory of becoming the first New Zealand-born world heavyweight champion, instead finding himself having to fend off a few verbal haymakers from Lance Revill.

Boxing is one of those sports that operates on long-standing grudges and barely concealed contempt but even still, in attempting to undermine Parker's championship credibility, Revill really only damaged his own and left himself open to a flurry of counterpunches from Dean Lonergan.

You could go around in circles arguing whether Andy Ruiz Jr's inside work was strong enough to sway the judges, or whether Parker's jab was the fight's dominant weapon. It was a close fight. It was a bloody interesting fight.

A colleague followed it via a live betting site. Parker opened up as a warm favourite and Ruiz Jr closed the gap until the point where they were at evens after the fifth round.

From then on to the end of the fight, Parker re-established a gap in the market and, when the bell went to signal the end of the fight, he was back at $1.33 to win on global betting market Bet365.com. Which is another way of saying that if Ruiz Jr really did thrash Parker, then Revill and very few others saw it.

Now the confetti has been cleared, we can also state with some authority that Parker might have reached a peak, but there are much higher ones to scale. Saturday might have been his biggest achievement but it also demonstrated that he is far from the finished product.

On the non-subjective boxrec.com ratings, Parker remains their No5-ranked heavyweight " behind Luis Ortiz, Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder and Kubrat Pulev " but has slipped to a curiously low 85th on the pound-for-pound rankings (behind welterweight Jeff Horn, No74, who fought on Saturday's undercard). Most pundits would have Parker also behind the suspended Tyson Fury and Wladimir Klitschko, who has slipped out of the rankings because of inactivity.

But he is on the rise, he is marketable and he is a belt holder. There will come a time when he needs to try to add to the WBO title but the Parker camp should not be in a rush.

For the second time this year, Parker looked a little caught in the moment. Just like against Carlos Takam in Manukau in May, the 24-year-old struggled to establish a rhythm against a tough man with a decent chin. There was no flow to his work early on, instead Ruiz Jr staked himself to a big lead that Parker did well to whittle down.

Putting him up against Ruiz Jr again would appear to have little value, either for Parker's development or in terms of a box-office draw, though it'd be certain to draw a big crowd in Mexico. Frankly, Duco would be nuts to send him in to that environment. Far better to have Parker face a few decent but KO'able pretenders before putting him against one of the real big guns.

Parker doesn't hurt easily. He had fewer marks post-Ruiz Jr than he did against Takam, but for such a powerful, athletic guy, it sometimes appears like he struggles to tag opponents. For his long-term prospects of defending this belt and adding others, it would make sense to have Parker learning how to end some big fights early.

Because as Lance Revill will no doubt tell him, if you leave it in the hands of the judges, one of these days you're going to get a result you don't like.