Alex Arthur’s moment of triumph was a family affair. Joe Calzaghe lifted Alex Jr into the ring and champion and son rolled around on the canvas, oblivious to the outside world moments after Arthur had become the WBO’s interim super-featherweight champion.

Koba Gogoladze, a Georgian based in Philadelphia, was knocked down three times as Arthur won on a tenth-round stoppage in Cardiff. But Arthur was keen to acknowledge his debt to a fallen idol, Scott Harrison, the former WBO featherweight champion.

Arthur and Harrison fell out, in the way that everyone in the insular world of Scottish boxing seems to fall out from time to time. But on his own big night, Arthur had thoughts of his former sparring partner and mentor, whose life has disintegrated with problems with the bottle and the law. Last week, Harrison was declared bankrupt.

“The night Scott won the world title, he came in the dressing-room and said to me ’you’re time will come’,” Arthur said. “I hope he was watching me, he was a part of all this with the education he gave me and all the sparring. It was an honour to fight on his undercards and he was a great world champion for Scotland. I hope he can come back, not to box, but just as a good guy.” Arthur has to wait 180 days to discover if he is going to follow Harrison as Scotland’s ninth world champion. That is how long the WBO have given Joan Guzmán, the champion from the Dominican Republic, to either face the Scot or give up the belt. Guzmán has shown little to suggest that Arthur is on his radar.

“Guzmán is in an elite club, with the likes of Marco Antonio Barrera and Juan Manuel Márquez,” Arthur said. “I’d like to get membership of that club.” British boxing is in such a healthy state at present, it seems every way you turn there is a potential super-star. Enzo Maccarinelli has long been in the shade of Calzaghe, the WBO super-middleweight champion, but he looked the real deal as he stepped up to primetime with a comprehensive victory over Wayne Braithwaite to retain his WBO cruiserweight title. It was his biggest test and he passed with flying colours.

On a night that also saw Gavin Rees win the WBA light-welterweight title, Maccarinelli’s unanimous points victory over Braithwaite, the former WBC champion from Guyana, rivalled Ricky Hatton’s win over José Luis Castillo last month as the best performance of 2007 by a Brit.

Calzaghe, Maccarinelli’s gym-mate and friend, sat in the front row, bouncing about, throwing and ducking every punch. But Maccarinelli, who hurt his right hand early on, was in full charge himself, commanding behind a ramrod left jab and pounding away with his left hook against an opponent who was tough and still ambitious. Plenty of times Braithwaite was hurt, in the fifth he was on the floor from a left hook, but he refused to give up. “Every time I hurt him, the bell seemed to come,” Maccarinelli, 26, said. “But he was always dangerous.” Three years ago, Rees was at rock bottom, wasting his career in the pub when he was given a community service order for punching a man at a funeral – an incident which also resulted in a year ban from the ring.

Now Rees is a world champion – the third, after Calzaghe and Maccarinelli from the camp of Enzo Calzaghe – after producing one of the biggest upsets in the history of British boxing when he won the WBA light-welterweight title with a unanimous points victory over Souleymane M’Baye. Rees, who had a 6½in height disadvantage, simply outworked the champion from France, who seemed completely unprepared for the smaller man’s bustling style.

“No one backed me apart from Enzo and the boys in the gym,” Rees, 26, said. “I was never going to give up, boxing is all I know.”

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