attempt to keep out of range. However, in the closing seconds of both rounds, Katsidis was able to launch a charging attack and finish strongly at the bell. In the third round, Katsidis continued to charge at Mitchell and was soon able to land a combination of hooks which made the latter stumble backwards on unsteady legs. From thereon, Mitchell was unable to fully regain his composure and, less than two minutes later, he was buckled by a hard left hook and a further succession of unanswered punches, at which point referee Dave Parris stopped the fight. The waiting game Immediately after the Mitchell bout, the WBO mandated that Juan Manuel Márquez must face Katsidis for the 'full' version of the lightweight world championship, or risk being stripped. This was reiterated some months later, following Márquez's victory over Juan Díaz in a rematch of their 2009 fight. Katsidis was in attendance for the aforementioned event in order to scout out the winner and primarily to assert his claim to be next in line against Márquez. World title challenge On 25 August the CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, Richard Schaefer, announced that Márquez had decided to stay at lightweight and defend his unified WBA, WBO, Ring, and lineal titles against Katsidis on 27 November at the MGM Grand. Golden Boy Promotions founder Oscar De La Hoya titled the event as Warriors, and it was to be Katsidis' first time headlining an HBO World Championship Boxing broadcast (having twice previously headlined HBO's Boxing After Dark, against Casamayor and Díaz). Tragedy occurred during Katsidis' pre-fight preparation and training in Thailand, when his brother Stathi Katsidis died on 19 October. In what many observers were anticipating to be a highly fan-friendly fight, Márquez suffered a knockdown in round three from a hard Katsidis left hook. He managed to recover swiftly, building up a lead on all the judges' scorecards and gradually neutralising Katsidis' aggression with accurate counterpunching at close range. In the ninth round, Márquez landed a succession of cleanly landed uppercuts on an unsteady Katsidis (who had already been staggered by an uppercut in the eighth), prompting referee Kenny Bayless to step in and halt the fight. Despite a third defeat for Katsidis, the fight went on to win HBO's award for 2010 Fight of the Year. 2011: further losses Katsidis' next fight took place on 9 April 2011 against Robert Guerrero, in