BOXING is a sport that can enthral me like no other, but it has an ability to frustrate that exceeds even football.

Several examples prevail from the past month, the last three successive weekends producing contests, schedules, results and decisions that have been frustrating in the extreme.

On Saturday night at London’s York Hall, Gary Buckland was denied a chance to become the first two-weight winner of the Matchroom and Sky Sports driven travesty to the sport, Prizefighter, an inane Twenty20 inspired format that has long since outlived its attraction.

St Joes-trained Buckland was denied – and now leaves with a loss on his record and missed a £32,000 payday – by virtue of a semi-final defeat to eventual winner Jono Carroll, 29-28 via split-decision.

That’s all well and good, but nearly everyone who watched that fight was convinced Buckland won, including this reporter.

And the frustration lies in the fact that contentious boxing decisions happen all the time. They litter the sport.

Yet the repercussions for bad officiating don’t exist. No-one in boxing judges the judges. It was ever thus.

Fast forward a further week and we have two bug bears wrapped in one, a lack of courtesy to a paying viewing public and a total hype job failing to dupe them.

These irritations occurred on Frank Warren’s show in London, where Dereck Chisora and Tyson Fury failed to deliver in a massive way in a headline fight and a week earlier in Liverpool.

The bad blood between Fury and Chisora was marketed to the hilt, but Chisora barely looked in good enough condition to stand up for 36 minutes, let alone beat a decent British heavyweight.

Worst of all, this one-sided snooze of a fight which wasn’t helped by Fury’s risk free jabbing strategy; didn’t finish until past 1am, despite being tailored for the British rather than US market and being screened on a UK subscription channel.

It was a similar story a week earlier when I returned to my hotel well past 2am after covering Nathan Cleverly’s disappointing display in Liverpool against Tony Bellew, a PPV fight, apparently.

This was yet another hyped contest that couldn’t deliver and it’s been farcical listening to Bellew rewriting history as to the value of the victory.

There isn’t really redemption over Cleverly; because the first fight is remembered fondly as a great tear-up between two quality British fighters. The second is remembered as a very poor contest between an average and a blown-up cruiserweight that left its paying audience in no rush to see either man fight again.