When Savannah Marshall fights Claressa Shields this weekend, live on Sky Sports, she insists she will be calm. She has to be.
On Saturday, when the crowd at the O2 Arena will be roaring all around them, when they will be fighting for the undisputed middleweight championship of the world, when they can finally put to rest a rivalry that has festered for more than a decade, all that noise and fury can fall away.
Because at last they can box, and for Marshall when she steps through the ropes it’s simple. “It’s like home,” she says.
That is because she has been working for this for so long. At the outset of their preparations her trainer Peter Fury warned her camp would be brutal. He was being perfectly honest.
Marshall has taken her training to a new level for this fight. “It was awful. It’s more the duration of it, normally I do six to eight [weeks], I’ve done 12. Even the rounds of sparring. Normally I do two or three 10 rounders, I must have done six to eight. Everything’s just been ramped up,” she told Sky Sports.