Floyd Mayweather beat Conor McGregor by 10th round TKO to win their ‘Fight of the Century’ in Las Vegas. GARY LEMKE offers his assessment.

So much for Conor McGregor’s loud predictions of knocking out boxing’s best fighter of this generation. For those who believed his hype, job done young man. It went a long way to selling the richest boxing event in history.

But it was never going to happen. Not in 10 seconds, two rounds or four rounds as he had promised. In fact, never in a hundred years.

McGregor didn’t embarrass himself, but there will be dozens of other super-welterweights hoping that this isn’t the first and last fight of his boxing career, because they will be confident of not only also beating him, but making some good cash in the process.

Although McGregor lasted until 1min 5sec into the 10th round of their scheduled 12-rounder in Las Vegas, Floyd Mayweather’s swansong was one of his easier nights in the ring in the last few years.

Yes, McGregor, the poster boy of the UFC, who had talked his way into a cross-over contest with an unbeaten 40-year-old who was going for a record-breaking 50th win in an unbeaten professional career, did his best in a boxing’s sense to spring the biggest upset in sports history.

In fact, he even won the first round 10-9 on the scorecards of all three judges, while ringside commentators had him ahead on points after three rounds, with Mayweather apparently ‘bemused’ by the Irishman’s style.

That style involved making use of his height and reach advantage, sticking out a right southpaw jab, throwing left hands – although, as we suggested in the build-up, the power that is so apparent in MMA is largely ineffective in a square ring because the punches are thrown differently in a boxing ring.

Also, McGregor’s only remote chance would have been to throw early bombs at Mayweather. He didn’t and instead chose to push out his punches, and ‘boxing’ the American, rather than delivering them with concussive intent. The commentators might have felt that by ‘touching’ Mayweather’s head he was rattling up the points. But he needed to do more than that.

And as many predicted, Mayweather, who has one of the best brains boxing has ever seen, took a couple of rounds to figure out what the trash-talking Irishman had in his locker. After three rounds he’d seen enough to know there was no real danger, and he started to go to work.

In fact, in the post-fight interview, the American said everything had gone to plan. ‘We know that McGregor can fight for 25 minutes [5x5min MMA rounds].’ In other words, McGregor is an eight-round fighter in boxing parlance.

The Mayweather plan was to wait for the younger man to empty the gas tank and then really go to work. And so it proved. In the eighth round McGregor’s legs started to betray him and it was increasingly obvious the fight would end when Mayweather wanted it to end.

Again, as many predicted, referee Richard Byrd stepped in to save an exhausted McGregor from further punishment at 1:05 in the 10th round, which was 28min into the contest. It shows the different kind of fitness that applies in boxing and MMA.

The lion-hearted McGregor would have hit the canvas for the first time in that 10th round had he not been rescued, and given the state of his legs and fatigued body, it’s unlikely he would have beaten the count.

At least he was left with all his faculties to count the $100-million and upwards he will have earned once all the final pay-per-view figures come in. Mayweather, in taking his record to 50-0, is sure to earn double as much, and then some more.

It was a relatively easy night’s work for him, for despite the sometimes surprising and effective awkwardness of a man making his professional boxing debut, Mayweather was unmarked and hardly breathing hard enough to blow out a candle at the end.

He also confirmed it would be the last time he will be seen in the boxing ring with gloves on, and he reminded the global TV audience that he’d lived up to his promise that the contest ‘would not go the distance’.

Was the event worth the hype? After all, many had called the meeting of a boxing great and the marquee act of UFC ‘a farce’. The answer has to be, that while it was predictable – Mayweather was an odds-on favourite to win inside the distance, and that’s even considering the last time he did that was in 2011 – it was interesting.

McGregor’s actual boxing skills, or lack of them, were rudely exposed at this level, while it’s surprising how he suddenly went from steady to being shot within the space of a round, in the eighth. And it’s not as if the bout wasn’t contested at a furious pace.

At the time of the stoppage all three judges had Mayweather ahead, by 87-83, 89-82 and 89-81. I had the American leading 88-84 going into the defining 10th round.