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WHEN Welshman Liam Williams steps into the ring with Chris Eubank Jr. this week, he will be with new trainer Adam Booth, having their first fight together.
In Williams’s last contest, with coach Dominic Ingle in his corner, he lost to WBO middleweight champion Demetrius Andrade but he goes straight back in to a big fight against Brighton’s Eubank.
The show is being promoted by Wasserman and takes place in Wales next Saturday, after a Covid delay forced it to be rescheduled from last month.
After eight or nine weeks together, Booth is happy with what he sees.
“When the fight was made and I was looking at it from an outsider’s point of view, I thought it was a 50-50 fight and I told [promoter] Kalle [Sauerland] that,” explained Booth.
“I didn’t understand why they made the fight because the gain for Eubank and the risk didn’t add up, but I was looking forward to watching it because I thought it was a great fight. “Now I’m involved in it, training Liam, I’m genuinely excited by it. It’s a fight that’s in Liam’s control to win but he’s under no illusions and he knows what the other fella brings. He knows that he’s in for a seriously competitive fight and he’s ready for it, mentally and physically.”
Williams, who as well as Ingle has worked in the past with Welsh trainer Gary Lockett, has impressed Booth with the way he’s picked things up.
“His boxing IQ,” Booth said, of what’s surprised him… “and how quickly he went from being quite light on his feet to using his legs and sitting down on punches and being able to go from one to the other.”
But the most recent interactions with Williams have not been the extent of their relationship. They’ve been around each other over the years and Booth believes that’s one of the reasons why Williams wanted to work with him.
“I’ve known Liam for a while,” Booth continued. “He’s been to our gym sparring, sparring with George Groves, sparring with Josh Kelly, so I know him from that and when you’re looking for a coach who can take you to a main event fight, it’s not like there’s a big pond of coaches. We’ve always got on, in the gym, and on social media, so I had the call, said let’s try this for a couple of days and we gelled pretty quickly. And he’s been a great addition to the gym.”
When Williams first approached Booth, the trainer sought out advice from those closest to him about the assignment. It wasn’t because the fight is challenging or because it’s against Eubank, who he briefly trained in the past, but because Eubank’s cousin Harlem is one of Booth’s students.
But the coach says he ran everything by Harlem first and that there’s been no conflict in the gym because the fighters are pros, and they’ve trained at different times.
“Absolutely,” Booth said, when asked whether he ran the decision to work with Williams by Harlem first. “Before I even met up with Liam [I did]. Once I had the call, I chewed on it for two or three days, I spoke to my assistant coaches as well, mulled over it and it had piqued my interest. I spoke to Gary Logan and some people whose opinions I respect and decided I’d like to give it a go, but before I took it any further I couldn’t do it if it was going to have an effect on Harlem and me. So I had a long chat with Harlem, said why I’d like to do it, and Harlem said, ‘I haven’t got a problem with that as long as we don’t train together so I don’t feel compromised.’ Harlem and Liam aren’t gym buddies. They train with the same coach, in the same gym but at different times and we’ve known all along that Harlem is Team Chris Jr and him and Liam have been polite and respectful to one another because they’re both good dudes, they’re genuinely decent dudes. They know this is a business and we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. He wants his cousin to win, and we respect that. We wouldn’t expect anything less. We just make sure that he and Liam never train together. On fight week, Harlem is boxing as well and he’s in the Team Eubank Wasserman hotel and I’m in the hotel with Liam.”
Booth also says any previous knowledge he has of working with Chris Eubank will count for nothing on fight night because it was so long ago.
“He’s improved massively since then,” said Booth. “He’s totally changed. If you look at the Spike O’Sullivan fight and how he’s physically matured, matured as a fighter, look at the fights he’s had, years have gone by and he’s completely evolved and developed from the young fighter he was back then.”