By Jeff Aronow: Josh Warrington reportedly suffered a broken jaw, shoulder injury, and a perforated eardrum in his ninth-round knockout loss to Mauricio Lara last Saturday night, and his promoter Eddie Hearn is no-commital about a rematch with the mighty Mexican warrior.

Hearn states that they have a rematch clause in the contract with Team Lara (22-2, 15 KOs), and he believes that a second fight between him and former IBF featherweight champion Warrington (30-1, 7 KOs) would be huge later in the year.

Hearn wants Warrington to recover from loss, heal, and decide in which direction he wants to go in.

The rematch will be up to Warrington

Eddie says a rematch between Warrington and Lara would now be more significant than any potential fight between him against 126-lb champions Can Xu, Gary Russell Jr, and Emanuel Navarrete.

The boxing world wants to see if Warrington can avenge his loss to Lara or if he’ll suffer a second defeat.

“This guy isn’t in his league, but if you’re reckless and you open the door for opportunities, anything can happen,” said Hearn to iFL TV in trying to make sense of what went wrong for Warrington.

“He never recovered from the fourth round. He was too brave. If there were ever a rematch, it would be epic.

In the eighth round, he started to regress, and in the ninth round, he got hurt again and eventually knocked out.

Could they have pulled him out? Yes, but his dad was in his corner, and they felt he was OK to carry around. He couldn’t believe what happened,” said Hearn.

Howard Foster’s decision not to stop the fight

A lot of blame is being put on the shoulders of referee Howard Foster for his decision not to stop the fight in the fourth round when Warrington was knocked down the first time.

Warrington looked badly hurt when he got up from the knockdown, and he was wobbling even before the action resumed. If Lara’s aim weren’t so bad, he would have finished Warrington straightaway.

It was luck on Warrington’s part that Lara lacked the accuracy on his punches to finish him in the fourth. Foster arguably could have pulled Warrington out in the fourth, and no one would have blamed him.

We don’t know how much damage that Lara did to Warrington in the fight. Will Warrington ever be the same? We’ll find that out soon when he returns to the ring later this year, possibly in a second fight against the young 22-year Lara.

“You could tell he was concussed,” said Hearn about Warrington. “I’m sure he wants to do a rematch now.

“It’s a bigger fight than all of those names you just mentioned,” Hearn said about a rematch between Warrington and Lara being huge compared to other fights against Can Xu, Gary Russell Jr, and Emanuel Navarette.

“But it’s only a fight that happens if Josh is healthy, fit, safe. We have an option on Lara and his team, and that option is on Josh. If he wants a rematch, he can make it happen.

“t’s a massive fight, but I don’t think it’s worth talking about at the moment. Mauricio Lara wasn’t a world-class featherweight.

“He was a fringe guy that could pop a bit, a young kid,” Hearn said of Lara. “He changed his life, but I’d have preferred the other story, and maybe we’ll get that later in the year.

But he was very slow, and Josh was very fast and very clever, but he didn’t use those attributes. If he did, he would have won the fight.

“The promoter in me believes the rematch is massive, but the pal in me says ‘just make sure he’s alright,'” said Hearn about Warrington.