Anthony Yarde ready to shoulder burden of expectation at history-laced Royal Albert Hall

After The Damned, a topless ranting Muhammad Ali and a thousand nylon-clad thighs from Miss World nights, it is time for the Beast from Stratford to walk out under the strobing beam of a star’s light at the Royal Albert Hall.

On Friday night professional boxing returns to the ancient and beautiful venue for just the second time since 1999 and Anthony Yarde, known as ‘The Beast’, fights an American coastguard called Travis Reeves in a ring heavy with fabulous memories. The very finest to ever box in Britain fought inside the glorious round hall, plush with drapes, velvet, fat chairs, purple ropes, the grand organ and echoes in corridors from a thousand concerts.

There were also a few stinkers, men convicted of ring larceny long before their fights ended and articulate booing filled the acoustic brilliance of the venue. One Tuesday in October 1980 there was an event dubbed The Night of the Tijuana Tumblers; it entered boxing folklore, a night so awful it has never been forgotten. It has also been added to the sport’s rich lexicon and since that night all inept, collapsing and canvas-seeking imports are known as Tijuana Tumblers.

On that night four Mexican boxers went down in a total of just seven uncompleted rounds, their combined collapse was comic in the end and took under fifteen minutes. The BBC cameras were there to record the tumbling quartet – Mendez, Castro, Lopez and Torres – for the following night’s television and Harry Carpenter, his knuckles white with fury on the microphone, had to spread dignity like butter during the Second World War.

The ignoble art and the tricky men and women it attracted certainly played a regular role in the venerable hall’s daily life throughout the late Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties.

It was Frank Bruno’s home, the blood of countless champions has soiled the old canvas over decades and Naseem Hamed once transformed the venue when he put in a 300-second appearance in 1995. Hamed entered the ring that night from a space between two of the ornate gin-soaked boxes, dancing through the comfy swivel chairs, down the gentle slope, his music fierce, to vault walls and the ring ropes before the demolition of a Colombian – not a tumbler under any flag, by any stretch – called Juan Polo Perez. It felt like a cultural coup that night and it probably was: The kid was in town, stuff your organ.

“It’s an iconic place to fight,” Yarde acknowledged. “I want to be a part of its history.” It is a rich one, especially at light-heavyweight, with the ghosts of British boxers Chris Finnegan, John Conteh and Dennis Andries all haunting the industrial size dressing rooms – designed for an orchestra and not a 12-stone man, his trainers and somebody hired for the night to stop a cut.

The Royal Albert Hall always felt like boxing in a time machine, a gentler time that was oddly far more vicious, with men wearing old and tiny 8-ounce purple gloves by Bailey’s and the three-roped ring a blur behind a drifting and rising cloud of smoke. I can remember standing at the top of the hall for fights in the Seventies, only dreaming of what riches existed beyond the heavy drapes that closed and made soundproof the corridors surrounding the seats and boxes far below. It felt, years later, that covering a fight from ringside was a privilege.

There was a lot of expectation on those rare nights – hope and dread often enough that the Tumblers were not back in town – before the records of fighters were known, scrutinised and dismissed. On Friday night Reeves arrives with a reputation for resilience, which is good because Yarde has stopped or knocked out 16 of his 17 victims. Yarde is expected to be tested, Reeves is expected to test him, but as Yarde is finding out, expectation is most definitely a beast of burden. He is definitely in the right ring to leave an impression. It will be a joy to be back.