The only trouble was - he couldn’t answer it.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Carroll says. “I remember when I got the call for that fight I had smoked a lot of weed.

“So when that phone rang, I decided not to pick up.”

Carroll was 21 years old at the time and, after a clean and sober spell in Australia, he had found himself slipping back into his bad old ways on his return to Ireland that summer.

“I had only come back from Australia because my sister was getting married and she wanted me to be part of the wedding. The only problem was I spent my last money to fly home and then once I got back I was like ‘right, I’m stuck here now’.



“I had no idea what I was going to do, I met up with old friends and was back smoking weed after stopping all of that in Australia.

“I was catching up with the wrong people and my life just wasn’t in a very positive place. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have anything.”



What he did have, however, was a 2-0 boxing record after kicking off his professional career out in Australia. He made his debut in December 2012 in Perth before his second fight 12 months later where he stopped a 0-12 Thai man called Saming Chopchai.



Which brings us back to that phonecall.


“So they needed an opponent for Deco Geraghty,” Carroll says. “He was 6-0 at the time and about to go into Prizefighter.



“They had put a lot of investment into him. They phoned me up to offer me the fight and although I didn't answer the first time, I eventually got round to speaking to them and agreeing it.

“I was just a little stoner at the time, winging it at life and falling back into the bad routines. But I had sparred Deco when I was younger and knew he was very good over three rounds because he was an amazing amateur. So I said I’d fight him over six, but then at the press conference they dragged it back down to four.

“But I thought I had nothing to lose, and who am I to say no to this fight?”

It would end up being perhaps the biggest turning point of his career, as Geraghty was disqualified a minute into the final round of their clash at Dublin’s 3Arena.


On Saturday, exactly 4,137 days later, Carroll will return to the city’s largest boxing venue for the first time since that victory over Geraghty.

“I was a nobody that night,” he says. “Now I’m a somebody.”

On beating Geraghty, it was Carroll put forward into the Prizefighter tournament just three weeks later. He beat Stephen Foster, Gary Buckland and Michael Devine all on the same night to win the trophy.

Carroll (25-3-1, 7 KOs), is 33 now and has not boxed since beating Alexander Prado in Dubai a year ago.

He had been in discussions to fight Anthony Cacace in Dublin late last year but the Belfast man will instead challenge Jazza Dickens for his WBA junior-lightweight title at the top of the bill this weekend.

Carroll, nearly 12 years on from that fight with Geraghty, will instead face undefeated ‘Posh Boy’ Colm Murphy (16-0, 6 KOs) in a 12-round bout, with the winner in line for a potential shot at whoever wins the main event.

It has been a long road from his first experience at the arena, where the long-retired Matt Macklin topped the bill on a card which also featured the likes of Anthony Crolla and Patrick Hyland.

“It’s crazy to think about how much has changed since then,” Carroll says. “It’s like a different lifetime.

“But if you focus your energy on positive things you can achieve amazing things yourself. To think of where my life was then, I didn’t know I was at all.

“I didn’t know what I was setting out to accomplish, I just kept taking things step by step. I lost my mum at 15 and that teaches you that you never know when it’s going to be your last day. After that I didn’t really fear anything, I had nothing to lose and I took everything in my stride."

"It’s almost like driving from Dublin to Belfast. It could be pitch black at night and you can’t see anything around you. But as long as you can see that 10 feet ahead of you with the headlights, you can just keep moving forward.



“I’m living proof that if you do that you can reach your destination eventually.”