BOXING/World super-middleweight title fight:With the champions' belts draped over his shoulders, flanked by his father and trainer, Enzo, and promoter Frank Warren, who were both struggling to contain tears of joy, Joe Calzaghe smiled happily, safe in the knowledge that when the dust settled after this super-middleweight shoot-out in front of an announced 50,000 crowd at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium on Saturday, he was the man left standing at the top of the pile

Ten years after beating Chris Eubank to take the World Boxing Organisation super-middleweight title, he had repelled the dangerous and dignified Dane Mikkel Kessler to retain the WBO version of the title for the 21st time. He also added Kessler's World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council belts to a collection one suspects counts more for Calzaghe than the monetary rewards from years of battle that have long since set him up for life.

Simply put, there is nothing left for him in the super-middleweight division. Defeating Kessler, who honestly believed he had spotted flaws in Calzaghe that would see him crowned as the division's new, pre-eminent force, leaves Calzaghe knowing he has taken on and defeated all who have been put before him, and that the time is right for him to move up to the light heavyweight division for one last moneyspinning reprise.

But how different the fight had seemed in the fourth. Calzaghe had edged the earlier rounds, before the powerfully built Dane suddenly found his range, rocking Calzaghe with a series of head shots. It had been in Cardiff, at the old National Stadium, that Calzaghe's career had begun on the undercard of Lennox Lewis's fight against Frank Bruno, and now an awful, hitherto unthinkable symmetry seemed possible as he confronted defeat.

As Calzaghe leaned forward and fell into range behind his shots, Kessler was showing the handspeed and power that had made him such a feared puncher, rocking the Welshman with hooks and uppercuts.

But Calzaghe has always said, "True champions find a way to win whatever the circumstances," and now he had to put his words into action.

Calzaghe is nothing if not a warrior. With his father having demanded his son use the traditional method of jabbing his way back, and with Warren imploring from ringside that his fighter should eschew an inclination to slug it out with the Dane, Calzaghe slowly began to assume control.

After the contest, Kessler would say there had been two key moments that, for him, had turned the course of the fight. First, when he had hurt his man in the fourth but had not been accurate enough to find a way through to finish matters. Then, when Calzaghe nailed him with a thunderous body shot in the eighth that left the Dane winded, he had tied up with the finishing line in sight, losing rounds that left a knockout as his only hope.

Kessler did produce a heroic effort in the last round at a time when Calzaghe, typically, decided a logical course of safety-first tactics was not for him even though the fight was won. Calzaghe could easily have paid the price for his cavalier hurrah against an opponent who was dangerous to the final bell.

"He has crushed my dreams," said the unhappy Dane after the fight. But there was no disgrace in his showing and he would start as a favourite to regain his titles against any other super-middleweight in the world if Calzaghe chooses to vacate the belts going in search of light-heavyweight prizes.

As for Calzaghe, after 10 years and so many fights, he remains unchanged. Calzaghe's autobiography, No Ordinary Joe, a bestseller he has crafted with the assistance of the respected writer Bryan Doogan, may have a title designed to recognise a talent that now stands comparison with any to come out of the British Isles, but away from the spotlight, it is his very ordinariness that may have helped him stay at the top for so long.

"It's sweet. I was struggling at the end and I was a bit tired. But I felt I controlled the fight and was proud of my performance. When I put my boxing together, he couldn't get past my jab," he said.