Friel excited by boxing future

The Illies Golden Gloves coach, who was part of the impressive Northern Ireland boxing team, which secured three gold medals at the recent Commonwealth Games in Delhi, also knew that Dungiven's Eamonn O'Kane, along with all the fighters going to India, had a chance of securing a medal.

"I was selected as a team coach for the Commonwealth Games; you can't send all the coaches, so fortunately enough I was one of the coaches who was selected," he said.

"We predicted before we went to Delhi that we would have three or four medals; the team, between experience and youth was very good. Eamonn (O'Kane) was the most experienced and he has been away to major competitions, like in 2008 whenever he came back from the Europeans with a bronze, in 2007 he won a Commonwealth Championship gold medal in Liverpool, so anywhere he goes he comes back with medals.

"Eamonn said himself that he wasn't going to go back to boxing because of what happened in 2006 in Melbourne, but it was his wife that made him come back again and in his first two fights he fought a Sri Lankan fella and then he fought a Samoan guy and that was the country that he had the bad decision about in 2006.

"He said after the Games that after that fight against the Samoan guy, that was his most important fight to him and getting that monkey off his back and he felt good and he didn't care who he was going to fight after that."

Friel, who has been in the sport for a life-time, also admits any young boxer who has potential has the chance of getting to the top because of the entire structure throughout both sides of the border.

"I was boxing since nine-years-old and the interest here in the north is growing and if anyone goes to our nine counties championships, we'll have around 180 to 200 kids competing in these championships and it's buzzing at the moment.

"Even for an Ireland perspective, any competition we go ahead to, from school boys to youth and juniors we are coming back with medals all the time and the High Performance in Dublin is something like a conveyor belt for boxing.

"If you become an Irish Schoolboy champion you go to Dublin to the High Performance Unit and that operation has been going now for about nine years but the dividends are now starting to show.

"Some of the guys in the Northern Ireland squad are part of the High Performance Team and those High Performance boxers are full-time athletes, obviously not the school guys, as they only train at the weekends, but the likes of Eamonn, Paddy Barnes and Tyrone McCullagh, they are full-time athletes and they are carded by the Irish Sports Council and Sport NI helps them out as well."

The mechanic also tells young boxers, no matter how good they feel they are, that they should stay amateur for as long as they can.

"Boxing is buzzing at the minute at the professional level, with the likes of Paul McCloskey, John Duddy and young Martin Lindsay in Belfast, Irish boxing in the main is great at the minute.

"But what I would like to say to any of the guys that are on the High Performance Team, it's not feasible for them to turn professional; they are getting better money, they have all the facilities, the top coaches physios and doctors are all there at their disposal.

"I won't advise any young kid out there, especially if they are on the High Performance Team to turn professional, because it's different all together."

Friel, a member of the Ulster Council, is hoping a masterplan to bring boxing to schools throughout the city and beyond, will ensure further champions in the years to come.

"In Leinster they have started a pilot scheme of bringing the boxing to the schools, so hopefully in the very near future we are hoping to bring that out to the rest of the province.

"I'm hoping that the Ulster Council will be able to bring boxing out to the schools, they'll be selecting special coaches to the schools and that will be something similar to what the GAA are doing, so it's onwards and upwards and hopefully this can happen very, very soon," he concluded.