Liam Williams may not have got the world-title shot he has craved for years in 2020, but he says that he is feeling like a lucky man. Williams puts his British middleweight title on the line against Andrew Robinson at the BT Sport Studios in East London on Saturday night, not the fight he wanted, but after all that has happened this year, he is glad to be boxing at all.

Williams ended 2019 in sensational style as he bludgeoned Alantez Fox to defeat in a WBO final eliminator. It should have led to a shot at Demetrius Andrade, but that will not happen until next year now. Not that Williams is worrying about that too much at the moment.

“I would say I am pretty lucky the way things are at the moment,” he said. “Let’s be honest, the situation with Covid doesn’t seem to be getting a lot better. It looked like they were getting on top of things and then it seems to be picking up again.

“A full year out of the ring is no good for anybody and I like to have a lot of momentum going into a fight. You don’t want to be starting and stopping, I’m just really happy and excited.”

Williams has been training in Sheffield, with Dominic Ingle, but after the fight he will be headed home to the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, where the area is back in lockdown. While he is planning a week off from training, he doesn’t want to get in into the kind of rut he did last time.

“At the start of the lockdown I was loving life, I was thinking ‘f---king hell, this is class’,” he said. “I didn’t have to leave the house, I could just sit in my pyjamas all day and eat food. After about two days I was bored sh-tless.

“I did my fair share of work, but not as much as I probably should have, but probably more than a lot of others. I was trying to make the most of what I had, whether I was In the garden, or running a mountain. I got a bag in the garage, did a lot of ground exercises and shadow boxing with weights. I had three to four months off the gym. Living in the Rhondda Valley, there are mountains all around me, so I’m pretty lucky.

Much of the talk has been of Andrade, but Williams, 28, is good at putting such things to the back of his mind.

“I don’t really know what has been going on,” he said. “There have obviously been talks behind the scenes, but I told them I couldn’t care less about any details until I get through this fight. When I wake up on Sunday morning we can talk about Andrade.

“Robinson is coming off a good win, so he is on a mental high from that. He feels he is in a good place. But I can’t afford to overlook him and I haven’t overlooked him. I’m going to good job on him. He’s tall, rangy and quite unorthodox in the way he goes about things. I’m pretty sure I will be able to figure him out and break him down.

“Everyone brings their own threats so you have to take every individual differently, so we have been working on different things in the gym. I believe I will break him down and stop him.”

Ron Lewis is a senior writer for Boxing Scene. 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.