Defeated but not broken, Ricky Hatton has plenty of fight left in him. It took only 30 minutes after he had been stopped by Floyd Mayweather Jr for “The Hitman” to dispel talk of retirement as he turned to his father and manager, Ray, and said: “I’m not going out on my a***.”

“My thoughts haven’t changed,” a bruised Hatton said the day after his tenth-round defeat by Mayweather at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. “My pride is more hurt than anything else. I’ll be damned if Ricky Hatton is going to finish with the last fight of his life getting knocked out by someone. I can’t stand fighters who pile on a load of excuses when it goes t**s up. You can say it was this and that and the other, but I got beat by the better man. It wasn’t my night.”

However, Hatton, 29, said that he is not likely to attempt to box as a welterweight again. The bout, for the WBC title, was his second in the division after he scraped past Luis Collazo to win the WBA title last year. A future back at light-welterweight, where he has had 42 of his 44 bouts, beckons.

“Floyd isn’t the biggest puncher I’ve met, but you do notice the difference [at welterweight],” Hatton said. “Whether he was too big or whatever, I was well capable of winning that fight and I wasn’t saying before that I would win to make everyone feel good. I believed I could win that fight.”

Hatton continued to criticise Joe Cortez, the referee, admitting that he abused Cortez when he came to his corner between rounds. “I made the cardinal sin of letting what was happening in the ring get the better of me,” Hatton said. “If you watch the fight, I got cut, which is never a good thing, and it was caused by an elbow. I hit him with a right hook to the body several times, but the referee was warning me. I don’t think I helped myself when he warned me in the corner and I gave him abuse.”

Ray Hatton said that there are plenty of options available. “We are not being arrogant, but it’s a good situation when you have networks like HBO who want to sit down with you because they don’t want to lose Ricky,” he said. “The impact he has made over here is phenomenal. Ricky would want to fight at somewhere like Madison Square Garden. He fought there early in his career and wants to go back there again at some stage to top the bill.”

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