If club rivalries had been mellowed by the off-season, then pitting 24 players from various major rugby clubs against each other in the boxing ring seemed the perfect way to renew them.
Enter Club Fight Night- charity gala and white-collar boxing rolled into one, with auction funds and fighter pledges going to charitable organisations in Hong Kong such as Darkness into Light and Operation Breakthrough.
Months of hard work on the bag led to some heart-stopping exchanges throughout, with the hard-hitting heavyweight clashes between USRC's Alex Woodburn vs HK Scottish's Stuart Gunn and HKFC's Jack Nielsen vs DB Pirates' Edward Peters in particular raising the roof of the Kerry Hotel ballroom.
Highlights video:
The lower weight classes served up an equally sumptuous feast of boxing, with the encounter between Shirley Yuen of Kowloon RFC (52kg) and URFC's Estelle Barbaroux (46kg) taking the form of a fascinating back-and-forth battle which eventually saw Yuen prevail with a unanimous ruling.*
While most of the fights came down to the judges' decisions, HKFC's Josh Dillon seemed to be in a hurry to end his bout against Typhoon's Aidan Dent, delivering a devastating knockout in the first round that the referee deemed enough to end the fight in his favour.
The popularity of the event certainly bodes well for the future, with participating clubs such as the Discovery Bay Pirates, Hong Kong Football Club, Hong Kong Cricket Club, Kowloon RFC, Hong Kong Scottish, USRC and Typhoons RFC turning up in huge numbers to show their support.
*Editor's Note: We apologise that in the original publication of this article, we stated there was a 10kg weight difference between Estelle Barbaroux and Shirley Yuen. This was due to a misreading of the information supplied by Club Fight night's Facebook page on our part, and we have since been supplied with the correct weight difference between the fighters. Thank you to our keen readers who were quick to point out this mistake!
Full results:
Bout 1: Casey Stone vs Lionel Trentini (winner)
Bout 2: Lisa Twinley (winner) vs Sophie Short
Bout 3: Donal Gray vs Will Drake (winner)
Bout 4: Juan-Claude Richards vs Will Wright (winner)
Bout 5: Anna Wilson (winner) vs Amani Gong
Bout 6: Bobbo Kane vs James Stevenson (winner)
Bout 7: Alex Woodburn (winner) vs Stuart Gunn
Bout 8: Devi Kumar (winner) vs Stephanie Siu
Bout 9: Shirley Yuen (winner) vs Estelle Barbaroux
Bout 10: Edward Peters vs Jack Nielsen (winner)
Bout 11: Aidan Dent vs Joshua Dillon (winner)
Bout 12: Franck Vinchon vs Nikolai Lam (winner)