Peter Fury, trainer of Rico Verhoeven and the orchestrator of the game plan that gave Oleksandr Usyk so much trouble in Egypt on Saturday night, was on the same plane back to England as the referee who stopped the fight, in the Ukrainian's favor, in the 11th round.
Verhoeven, 1-1 (1 KO), was given no chance of being competitive against the 25-0 (16 KOs) Usyk beforehand. So it came as a huge surprise when, after 10 rounds, the huge underdog looked to be on the brink of winning the fight to most observers.
Usyk upped the pressure, twisting back the head of his foe with an uppercut that scored a knockdown, then following up for five-or-so seconds until the bell sounded to end the 11 th and penultimate session. By then, Lyson had stopped the fight, 'rescuing' the Dutchman.
Talking to IFLTV, Fury explained that though the decision of Mark Lyson - the referee from Liverpool, England - was a source of annoyance he could also accept that it was merely a mistake.
"The best way to sort any dispute is going and asking the question, isn't it, to the person who's done it," Fury explained about his feelings when he spotted Lyson on the same flight home. "I said, 'You've made a mistake'. He said to me, and this is every important, 'Peter, I didn't hear the bell.'
'I said, 'Now that I believe,' because I didn't hear the bell, either... Obviously, it was all in the heat of the moment. Rico's gone down, Usyk has gone into finish it. He's [Lyson] behind Usyk and there's been no punches landed.
"So, I am going to call it a genuine mistake. That's all you can do; you can't accuse the fella of anything else. That would be ridiculous. There's no facts there and, I spoke to him, and, honestly, he said he'd never heard the bell.
"I thought we seen an excellent fight so we can talk and talk about glitches or what the referee should and shouldn't be doing. But one minute, fights are being stopped too soon, one minute, they're being stopped too late, and this is the problem when we have a third man [the referee] in the ring."
