Right Then, He Gets There In The End
Right then. There is not a harder-luck story in the super bantamweight division than Sam Goodman, and on Sunday at Toyota Arena in Tokyo he finally gets to do something about it.
Goodman fights Ryosuke Nishida for the interim IBF super bantamweight title, on the undercard of Takuma Inoue against Tenshin Nasukawa. The IBF ordered it because Naoya Inoue has nothing in the diary, and rather than let the division sit still they have put a belt on the line and told two men to sort out who is next.
The winner becomes the mandatory. Which is, of course, exactly where Goodman was already supposed to be.
Twice Booked, Twice Gone
Let's not beat around the bush. Goodman was signed, sealed and announced to fight Naoya Inoue in Tokyo, and then a cut in sparring took it away. He got it rebooked. Another cut in sparring took that away too.
Two shots at the best fighter on the planet, both lost in a gym, neither of them to anything he did wrong in a fight. I cannot think of many worse pieces of luck in recent memory. It would have finished lesser fighters off mentally.
Instead he went back to work. He is 21-1 now, the single loss coming up at featherweight against Nick Ball in Riyadh in 2025 — a weight above his best and against a man who is an absolute handful for anybody. He came back down, beat Rodrigo Fabian Ruiz over twelve in April, and waited.
The 27-year-old from Albion Park in New South Wales is chasing something Australian boxing has not seen much of: a world title won on Japanese soil. That is Lionel Rose territory. If you know, you know.
Nishida Is A Proper Test, Not A Ceremony
Here is where I would push back on anyone treating this as a formality. Ryosuke Nishida is 11-1 with two knockouts, and that record flatters nobody's understanding of him.
He is a former IBF bantamweight world champion. He beat Vazquez in February to earn this position. Two knockouts in twelve fights tells you he is not going to blow Goodman away, but it tells you nothing about how awkward he is to actually hit clean — and that is the whole fight.
Nishida is tall for the weight, rangy, and he fights at a distance he chooses. Against a pressure-and-volume man he will look to make every exchange happen on his terms and then get out. Twelve rounds of that can slide past a fighter who does not cut the ring properly.
How It Plays Out
Goodman's best asset has always been his engine and his consistency. He does not have one-punch power and he does not need it. What he does is win rounds by being busier, tidier and more purposeful than the other man for thirty-six minutes, and he almost never has an off night.
Against Nishida that means cutting the ring rather than following him, getting to the body to slow the legs, and accepting that the first four rounds may well look scrappy and close. Goodman fights are often won in rounds seven through twelve on the back of a shift that was made in rounds three and four.
The danger is a familiar one for travelling fighters. If it is close and it goes to the cards in Tokyo, he needs to be clearly ahead, not narrowly. Anything inside two rounds and I would not fancy his chances of hearing his name read out.
Luke's Verdict
This is a genuinely good fight and I do not think it will be anywhere near as comfortable as the odds suggest.
But Goodman has been the best super bantamweight not called Naoya Inoue for a couple of years now, and he has spent that time watching other people take the nights he earned. There is a version of this where the frustration makes him over-press and Nishida picks him off. I do not think that is the version we get. He is too professional for it.
Sam Goodman by unanimous decision, something like 116-112, built on volume and body work in the back half. And then, at last, he is the mandatory for Inoue with nothing in the way except Inoue's diary.
He has earned a bit of luck. It is about time he got some.
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