Four-division world champion and trainer of Chris Eubank Jr, Roy Jones Jr, has outlined a clear plan for his fighter in light of recent talk that there was a choice between a rematch with Liam Smith or a fight with Conor Benn.
He had a rematch clause that he confirmed he would be activating, but there have been whispers that he would instead fight Conor Benn in the Middle East to complete a famous trilogy started by their fathers.
In an interview with iD Boxing, Jones insisted that a fight with Benn would have to wait.
“Come on man, Smith rematch. Come, on brother. If you are a winner, you want to win. You ain’t going to go take a loss and then go do something else, nah that ain’t how it goes.
I’m old-school, y’all must have forgot, if you lose you have to try get that back first. If you don’t get that back, then you go on, but you have got to try get that back first, you don’t lose and then go chase the money.”
Jones then suggested that he’d like a trilogy with Smith.
“Let’s go win first, then we have got to win again because it’s 1-1, if we take him out it is still even. So how it goes is we have got to do it a third time, once we finish that, then we can talk about Conor Benn, that is what I want to see.
If we took Conor Benn right away, that looks like we are admitting defeat to Liam Smith and we are almost saying that we can’t beat Liam, so we fight Conor. We are not saying that.”
It seems that Eubank will be taking Jones’ desired route, with Liam Smith revealing that a fight could be announced in the coming days.