Brandon Figueroa Stops Ball In 12th To Win WBA Title

Brandon Figueroa walked into Liverpool and did the one thing that makes a champion’s homecoming go quiet in an instant, stopping Nick Ball 32 seconds into the twelfth round to take the WBA featherweight title at the M&S Bank Arena. For Ball, it was the cruellest kind of ending: one short burst after eleven rounds of grim, noisy labour, and the belt gone before the crowd had even settled into the last stand.

For eleven rounds, it had been the sort of fight that makes sense on paper and hurts in practice. Ball, the compact whirlwind, kept driving his way into range with that bull-terrier urgency, while Figueroa—taller, looser, and happy to switch between orthodox and southpaw—tried to turn the ring into a long corridor where he could keep working without being smothered.

What stood out early was that Ball didn’t just rush; he boxed on the way in. CompuBox credited him with a career-high 117 jabs, a remarkable number for a man often described as a force of nature rather than a fencer, and he used them to touch Figueroa, upset his rhythm, and build attacks without having to eat something nasty first. Ball’s best spells came when he could step in behind the jab, set his feet for a moment, and then let the shorter hooks and right hands go in tight bursts before getting out of the line of return fire.

Figueroa’s reply was the old, unglamorous answer that wins fights when the rounds pile up: body work, and plenty of it. He threw vastly more leather overall—757 punches to Ball’s 567—and even when Ball was nicking the cleaner shots upstairs, Figueroa kept burrowing downstairs until the champion’s legs and posture began to tell the truth. The numbers matched the feeling in the building: Figueroa landed 94 body punches, and over half of his landed power shots went to the body. It wasn’t one memorable hook; it was a steady drain.

It was close enough, and punishing enough, that nobody in the arena seemed entirely sure which way it would be scored if it went the distance. Ball still looked dangerous—he always does—but he also looked like a man being asked to breathe through a narrowing straw. Figueroa, for all the punches he was missing, kept the fight permanently uncomfortable, the way volume fighters do: never letting you rest, never letting you admire your own work for more than a second.

Then the fight ended with the brutal clarity boxing keeps in reserve. Early in the twelfth, from southpaw, Figueroa landed a left hand to the chin that sent Ball face-first to the canvas. Ball beat the count, got his feet under him, but he couldn’t buy the seconds he needed. Figueroa swarmed, drove him into the ropes, and the referee stepped in with only 32 seconds gone in the round, rescuing Ball from a finish that was coming fast and getting uglier by the punch.

If you like your irony neat and numerical, Ball landed 35 more punches than Figueroa—249 to 214—and did so at a far higher connect rate: 43.9 per cent to 28.3 per cent. But Figueroa’s insistence on the body and his relentless output won him the night, and CompuBox had him landing 177 power punches, the most any opponent has ever landed on Ball. It was a reminder that you can win the tidy statistical arguments and still lose the only one that matters: who finishes stronger when the air gets thin.

When it was waved off, Liverpool did what Liverpool tends to do—make its displeasure known in the first rush of emotion—before the reality settled in. Their champion had been beaten in his own city by a man who kept punching when it stopped being pleasant, and who found the one clean moment he needed when the fight was poised to tip into the judges’ hands.