January fights usually mean a grim festive period for boxers, but Chris Eubank Jr insists that the threat posed by Liam Smith was not enough for him to put his celebrations on hold.

Eubank faces Smith, the two-time WBO super-welterweight champion, in Manchester on January 21, and while he has trained throughout under the guidance of Roy Jones Jr, it did not stop him celebrating with his family.

“I wasn’t going to give up Christmas and New Year for Liam Smith, he is just not dangerous enough,” Eubank said.

“I know what Liam is, I sparred Liam, I have watched him for years. Liam is very A, B, C – there are going to be no surprises, I know everything he is going to do and I know how to deal with fighters like that. That’s why I say there is not much of a danger there and it will not be as hard a fight as Conor Benn would have been.

“Liam has one way of doing things, whereas I can box, I can fight, I can brawl, I can swing, I can slug, I can dance around. He has one way of doing things, which is to come forward, tuck up, stay in the pocket and try and walk his man down. Will he try and change that for me? I don’t think you can change your fighting style at his age, unless you have the mind to do that, which I don’t think he has.”

Eubank admits that the shadow of the postponed fight with Conor Benn is still hanging over this. The fight was called off after Benn tested positive for a female fertility drug. It was subsequently revealed that he had failed a previous test for the substance too.

But while Benn has since given up his British licence and is yet to have a hearing for a doping offence, Eubank sees the fight as very much unfinished business and a fight that will happen at some point.

“It’s always going to be a concern,” Eubank said. “One – it is not resolved, two - the fight did not happen. We have got to make it happen at some point, so it is always going to be in my mind. Obviously, I have to focus on the man in front of me now, but I have some serious unfinished business.”

Jones is back in Eubank’s corner for this fight. Having worked with the former multiple weight champion in Brighton in December, Jones returned to England on Boxing Day after spending Christmas at home in Florida. Eubank believes that they are an excellent match.

“I can learn things on the fly, I am very good at picking things up, which is why I am with Roy,” he said.

“Roy brings stability, he brings discipline, guidance, a schedule. Before him I was doing my own thing, I was doing whatever I wanted to do. I was never the type to need to be pushed. Some guys need that, they need someone telling them what to do. But the experience and genius that this man has, I just must have him in the corner.

“He brings so many things, 99.9 per cent of the boxing population don’t know what he knows, so just listening to him, practising the things he shows me, sharpens my mind, sharpens my tools and adds little things to my already solid game.

“But I don’t need Roy to beat Liam Smith – if Roy wasn’t around the outcome would still be the same – but having there adds a little bit of spice. Roy will always be with me now for the rest of my career, unless I am fighting Conor Benn.

“That fight is a one-off and it is like a Eubank-Benn thing, it’s two names, it’s a British affair. That’s the one fight where it is Ronnie in the corner and my old man, if I can get him there, not Roy. But everything else, Roy will be with me.”

Eubank admitted there was a certain amount of trepidation when he first went to train with Jones. Great fighters do not always make great teachers and can get frustrated at pupils not being able to do things they might have found easy. But Eubank says he has had no such issues.

“When I went to his farm in Pensacola, that is the one thing I was wondering about,” he said. “He had these crazy reflexes, this combination of head movement and speed. I am very athletic, so I wasn’t worried about if I could do it, but I wondered how he would be if you don’t get things right.

“Some fighters, if it is not exactly how they want it, it’s not good enough. Roy is not like that. He watches his fighters and he tries to improve them to the best of his ability, he doesn’t say ‘this is the only way to do it and if you can’t do it, you’re wrong’. He sees what you are capable of and he works with it, which was great and I wasn’t expecting.

“Luckily, I could do all the things he was teaching me. That’s why we gel so well, because he is not used to that. A lot of the guys he has trained have not been able to implement the things he says.”

Having seen his big fight of 2022 scrapped in October, it must be something of a relief for Eubank to be out again so early in the New Year. But a record of three fights in three years is far from ideal.

“I am frustrated, I want to fight three times a year,” he said. “I fought once in 2022, it is just unacceptable. But these things happen, it’s out of my control.

“I wanted to make this fight happen in December, but we couldn’t turn it around that quick so it is happening in January.

“It is still not a bad thing because it means I can still fight again in the summer and the winter. Three times a year is what we are looking at – big names, world titles. I want those belts.”

Chris Eubank Jr v Liam Smith at Manchester's AO Arena on Jan 21 is love and exclusive on Sky Sports Box Office in the UK - tickets are on sale now.

Ron Lewis is a senior writer for BoxingScene. He was Boxing Correspondent for The Times, where he worked from 2001-2019 - covering four Olympic Games and numerous world title fights across the globe. He has written about boxing for a wide variety of publications worldwide since the 1980s.