Smith vs Eggington: Liam Smith on Kell Brook, regrets and world title ambitions
Written by News on 30/03/2019
Liam Smith tells Sky Sports about nagging regrets from his last fight, lasting world title ambitions, and the lure of a battle with Kell Brook.
Smith is modelling a cloak of positivity. Just days away from his first Sky Sports outing in almost six years, the Liverpool super-welterweight is in a boisterous mood ahead of his maiden fight for new promoters, Matchroom.
With Sam Eggington waiting for him in the opposite corner on Saturday night, Smith is relishing the opportunity to put on a show in front of his home crowd at the M&S Bank Arena, but underneath all the goodwill still loiters one huge regret and it’s been eating away at the former world champion since last summer.
“I’ll be honest straight up, I can’t get the Jaime Munguia loss out my system no matter how hard I try,” revealed Smith to Sky Sports shortly after another strenuous session under the studious eye of Joe Gallagher in Bolton.
“I’ve watched the fight back and there’s no way that I can say that he’s a better fighter than me. He won fair and square but going into the fight I think every single small margin was with him and that hurt me on the night. I’d fought Liam Williams the previous November and then I had to wait for nine months for the fight with Munguia. He was fighting quite regularly and I think that extra bit of preparation gave him a big advantage.”
Despite that loss, and the hurt and frustration it has piled on Smith, the confident 30-year-old is doing all he can to put it to the back of his mind before beginning another assault on the leading names at 154lbs.
In Smith’s last five fights, he’s endured some seriously hard nights with the two Williams grudge matches taking place between two defeats to the aforementioned Munguia, and Saul Alvarez, boxing’s premier superstar, back in September 2016. Obtaining a mixture of results via all sorts of method throughout that gruelling period, Smith finds himself somewhere in the bottom half of the world’s top 10, but there’s absolutely no hesitation from “Beefy” when answering whether he believes he’s world class or not.
“Absolutely I am. I can take the Canelo loss like a man because he was just someone who was too good for me every day of the week and since then he’s proved to be too good for everyone else as well. It’s the Munguia fight that gives me the confidence to believe that I’m world class because I know with the right build-up and a couple of fights shortly before facing him, it would’ve been a totally different fight.
“Don’t get me wrong, he was a good fighter and he’s a good champion, but I saw enough that night to know that if we ever met again then it’d be a totally different story. I was stronger on the inside, I don’t think he was that powerful, it was just that he had a lot more freshness going in because I’d been out the ring a very long time.”
For now, Smith’s focus is fully fixed on Eggington. The Birmingham scrapper has seen a dramatic downturn in form recently after bursting onto the scene around 2015 with an exciting run at domestic level that brought exciting wins over the likes of Glenn Foot and Frankie Gavin. A shock defeat to unheralded African, Hassan Mwakinyo, last September left Eggington’s career in tatters, but Smith is expecting the Midlands man to come out like a wounded animal and he’s prepared for the imminent onslaught.
“It’s probably the right fight for me at this stage before I can hopefully get back to competing in the big fights in America. I’ve had a long time out the ring and it’s important for me at this stage to be getting in fights before I start looking at the champions of the division.
“Sam will have a lot to prove on the night, but if I’m as good as believe I am then it’s a fight that I should be winning. I wouldn’t mind one more in the summer against a good solid contender, and then by the end of the year, I want to be looking at a massive fight against one of the world champions or even maybe a big domestic fight with Kell Brook. I’ve got a three-fight deal with Matchroom and Sky and I want to make this opportunity count.”
Watch Liam Smith against Sam Eggington, with Anthony Fowler against Scott Fitzgerald and David Price on the M&S Bank Arena bill in Liverpool on Saturday, from 7pm on Sky Sports Action.
(c) Sky News 2019: Smith vs Eggington: Liam Smith on Kell Brook, regrets and world title ambitions
