WHEN Danny Green had Roy Jones Jr on the ropes, the American having bravely fought back to his feet, he heard him groan.

The killer had the smell of blood.

Throughout his training camp, Green and trainer Angelo Hyder had been working on exactly the strategy that brought down Jones Jr last night. Stalk him into the ropes, jab him low to bring down his hands, and then fire the overhand right.

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It landed right above Jones Jr's left ear and the American, one of the greatest ever, hit the canvas and flopped around like a hooked fish. Green saw it, and one thought went through his mind. "I thought, 'You know, this could be over'," Green said.

It wasn't quite.

Jones Jr rose to his feet, but he was gone. He was all rubbery legs and went into protective mode - and here we saw the maturing of Danny Green.

He went patiently after Jones Jr, trying to bring down his hands before overwhelming him with a volley of punches. He knew referee Howard Foster would be compelled to stop the fight. "I knew he was in a lot of trouble," Green said. "He was groaning."

Jones Jr called it the old snake and hammer trick. It worked as perfectly as Green and Hyder had hoped. In winning last night's fight, Green has cemented his place as the most exciting fighter in Australia.

Here for the first time in a long time, we have a fighter not only prepared to take risks but also one with the ability to make good on them. Given the reputation of Jones, a certain Hall of Fame fighter, it was the greatest single performance in Australian boxing history.

Virtually a one-punch knockout in round one, who could have guessed. Green's best chance was always if he caught Jones clean on the chin. It was exactly what he had trained for.

Then a night before the fight, he went to Acer Arena at exactly the time he would be fighting and looked around the stadium. "It was empty, cold, quiet," Green said. The nerves began to bite at him.

He said: "This is good, this is healthy, this is what you should be going through. This is positive, this is natural, this is what you have got to go through."

Green knew what everybody had been saying, and he drew strength from all of it. "There is positivity when you've got that self belief that you can do what no one thinks you can do," Green said. "That's why this victory is so much sweeter."

While Jones Jr was last defeated by Welsh legend Joe Calzaghe, nobody had beaten him like last night. Even the devastating knockouts to Americans Antonio Tarver and Glen Johnson paled compared to Green's demolition.

Green did everything he planned. He stalked Jones into the corner and, first time, allowed him to pop out behind his jab. But he believed he was stronger than Jones and, after experiencing his jab, was quietly pleased that it was not as quick as he feared.

With that, his confidence grew.

His wife Nina had predicted a third-round knockout, but knowing her husband and watching how the fight began, she grabbed Green's father Malcolm by the hand and said, "Greeny's going to knock him out in the first round".

Green later said that such was his respect for Jones that part of him felt bad at the result.

To see a legend on the canvas like that ...

"I don't make excuses, it was a great performance by Danny," Jones Jr said. In the delirium that followed, Green said a thousand things, often taking them back. The man of action had become a man of words.

In the moments before the fight, Green called his training team around him, the ones that had stuck by him throughout, and he thanked them all with a small speech. Then he went out to make good on his final words.

"Let's go light this city up."

Originally published as Green shows fists of steel