Hearn Urges Caution Over Likely Rematch

Promoter certain of second fight between Eubank Jr and Benn but is still worried about difference in weight

- Donald McRae

“I want my revenge, man,” Conor Benn said quietly in the early hours of yesterday morning as his bruised face reflected his emotional pain after he lost against Chris Eubank Jr in a brawl at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “I want my revenge.”

Those typical boxing words echoed the misguided clamour for a rematch with Eubank Jr. Eddie Hearn admitted that he would prefer Benn to move back down two divisions to welterweight but the promoter grinned helplessly: “The public, His Excellency, everybody’s going to want the rematch.”

Turki al-Sheikh heads Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority which splurges billions of dollars while controlling the fight game. Boxing’s fawning over his largesse means that he must be called His Excellency and Hearn said, with suitable deference: “You heard His Excellency in the ring. He’s booked the [rematch] date here, for September.”

Hearn had already claimed, with an abandon which matched Benn’s wild swings in the ring, that we had just witnessed “one of the greatest fights in British boxing history”. That was a seismic exaggeration. Benn and Eubank Jr produced a dramatic slugfest where limited skill was dwarfed by considerable courage. It was an unnatural match-up between an ageing middleweight and a raw welterweight.