Liam Smith’s trainer slams Chris Eubank Jr ‘threats’ as he admits ‘Beefy’ was ‘f*****’

Liam Smith’s trainer has admitted that he didn’t want his fighter to take on Chris Eubank Jr last weekend.

This was down to the drastic weight loss that Smith had to undergo to get down to the middleweight limit for fight night, as the Liverpudlian revealed he shed 42lbs.

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And it showed in the ring, as Smith looked a shadow of the man who had won the first fight, going on to get knocked down twice on his way to a tenth-round stoppage defeat.

Smith found it hard to keep the weight off following his fourth-round knockout win in the first fight as he suffered a back injury while training for the rematch, which was delayed twice.

“This is a fact, my own self, as his coach, said, ‘Son, there’s no way you can fight this date. You’re too heavy,’” Smith’s trainer Joe McNally told Boxing News+ as quoted by Boxing Scene.

“You’re gonna need at least eight to ten weeks to get the weight off. On the consensus that his back wasn’t 100 per cent to do his road work, to put the work in to get the weight off to start camp. It’s a bit harsh. His weight was good until the injury. [Smith said], ‘No, I’ll do it, I’ll do it, I’ll do it.’

“And he literally had to be in—I ran the numbers eight weeks out with the nutritionist—he had to be in a 15,000-calorie deficiency a week.

“One thing in life that don’t lie is numbers. And sometimes, theoretically, that can be contradictory because of the autonomy of the human body, but he had to be in a major calorific deficiency the whole of the camp and fight week even worse.

“We had check weight testings, two or three of them, and he hit the goals. But he hit the goals and [was] f*****.

“On fight night, only people with two glass eyes couldn’t see that he was f*****.”

McNally has also hit out at Eubank and his team for threatening to pull the bout if Smith delayed the fight date further, as he said: “I asked for the fight to be moved. I’m just disappointed in the people behind the promotions and s*** like that obviously didn’t listen, and the threats that came to Liam.

“I said to Liam, you can’t fight this date. Look, the facts that I got is, well, if I don’t accept this date, Chris is gone. I’ve lost the fight.

“Then he’s left in limbo, which the fight he got threatened with is Chris is gonna fight Conor Benn.

“And then the other threat is if we changed the date… Sauerland would sue Liam and the promotion and Sky for loss of earnings. That’s a fact.”

McNally finished by saying: “It’s disappointing… we could’ve had a cracking Eubank-Smith 2, but we got a bit of farce, really, haven’t we?”