by Tamas Pradarics

Not too long after his shocking third round knockout loss by the hands of Terence Crawford in an undisputed super lightweight world championship bout last Saturday, Julius Indongo and his team left the United States to fly home to Africa. They hit the Omaha Airport by noon on Sunday and arrived home to Windhoek, Namibia in the early hours of Tuesday, after a roughly 30-hour long journey.

Crawford and Indongo faced off in a historic four-belt (five including The Ring title) unification fight at the Pinnacle Bank Arena in Lincoln, Nebraska. After a close first round, the American Crawford dropped his unbeaten opponent with a straight left hand landed behind the ear in the second. Indongo seemed to recover from the blow but went down and out in the next frame after a vicious left hook to the side of his body.

While heading home to Namibia, trainer and manager of Indongo, Nestor Tobias graciously took the time to share his thoughts about the fight with BoxingScene.com.

”Crawford is very skillful and he can see everything in front of him. Very slick, powerful, and can punch either he is going backward or forward. Julius was up for it but he was caught with a well placed and accurate body punch in the third round. That punch can take anyone out. You can go and ask Oscar de la Hoya about that [who got stopped with a left hook to the liver by Bernard Hopkins in a similar undisputed title fight in 2004]. You can't recover from a punch like that within sixty seconds,” told Tobias while he and his team were waiting for their plane to leave South Africa for Namibia.

”I think Julius recovered pretty well from the first knockdown in the second round and at that point, I thought we will have a good fight but unfortunately it all ended in the third. We just want to congratulate Terence Crawford. We hope he is now number one pound-for-pound in the world.”

To lose an anticipated super-fight the way like this could understandably make a fighter partially heartbroken. When the topic was mentioned to him, Tobias was short-spoken and rather turned his attention to the future.

”Julius is well, the pain only lasted a minute after that body shot. He is happy with his achievements and ready to continue his career,” said the Namibian manager.

”We will continue to do what we have been doing all the years and Julius will still be a part of our plans as he is one of the best fighters in the world. He will take a few weeks off and then we will see [what future holds for him].”