The boxing career of Danny “Kid” Ahrens hangs in the balance after just five professional fights because of a hand injury.

The unbeaten London-based Israeli light-middleweight sustained the injury in his fourth pro contest and the problem recurred in his most recent fight. He was seeing a specialist in Israel this week in the latest attempt to find a cure.

Ahrens’s manager/promoter Robert Waterman said that after the knuckle in the fighter’s right hand swelled up, an X-ray showed nothing broken. A subsequent MRI also indicated no significant damage and he had undergone physiotherapy and had a cortisone injection. But despite nursing the hand during training, “the first time he landed a punch, it blew up again." During his successful amateur career, Ahrens, 20, had surgery on a tendon in the hand.

"It is not an unusual problem for boxers but it is for one so young," Waterman added. “Danny wanted to do nothing other than professional boxing since he was a child. He is devastated."

The hope was that his career could be saved by an extended period of rest, or by corrective surgery. "But it's hard to fix something if you cannot find out exactly what it is."