“Yeah, okay then; no problem; sound; see you later,” Joe Gallagher responded to those at Sky Sports attempting to encourage him to the top table of Wednesday’s press conference at the conclusion of an interview with BoxingScene. “Don’t start pushing me when Price can’t turn up for a fucking head to head.”

The trainer and his fighter Natasha Jonas had showed up shortly before the final press conference to promote Jonas-Lauren Price was due to start, and when they did so the first thing Gallagher did was tell the staff at Boxxer that she would only be available for a handful of interviews. “Yesterday she was speaking to everyone and she needs to rest,” he said.

Wednesday represented the first time that BoxingScene had seen Gallagher since he shared the news of his diagnosis with stage four bowel and liver cancer. It also, immediately, brought the largely cathartic confirmation that in so many respects so little had changed.

Around 24 hours later, when at the weigh-in he questioned the “uncalibrated” scales used when Jonas, Price, and the undercard fighters weighed in, he delivered another reminder of that reality. Gallagher, 56, is capable of attempting to deliberately unnerve those his fighters are preparing for, but on Thursday he was asking valid questions, and doing so because of his fiercely competitive nature, his sense of responsibility to Jonas, his attention to detail, and his disregard for who he might therefore upset.

BoxingScene had arrived at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday evening behind Gallagher, Jonas and others from the Manchester-based Gallagher’s Gym, and in so doing witnessed his exasperation when he wanted to lead her to her dressing room and turned around to see that she had been intercepted by a small crew working on behalf of the broadcasters Sky Sports to interview her one last time before she made her way to the ring.

Those who have worked closest with him speak with admiration about his work ethic and sense of organisation. Since his diagnosis, in November – it was in February that it became public knowledge – since when his condition has evolved, they and many others have also been given considerable cause to admire him even more.

“Natasha’s good as gold – I’ve not asked her about it,” he told BoxingScene on Wednesday when asked how she had responded to learning that he is fighting so threatening a condition. “We’re just business as normal; I don’t want to hear none of that pity. 

“I was on the body belt and Mo [Mohammed Alakel] was half-tapping the body belt and I lost it. ‘Stop it – stop wrapping me up in cotton wool. I know what to do. Fucking let the shots go.’ Everyone was a bit nervous at first.”

“It was hard to process,” Jonas told BoxingScene when asked the same question. “I’m fortunate enough to have not been put in that situation before. So it was a shock. I didn’t have the words to say to respond or reply.

“[But] nothing’s changed. He’s still there for every session. He’s still shouting at me. He’s still telling me when I’m doing things right; doing things wrong; travelling down to sessions that I’m having in Liverpool; keeping an eye on me. He’s still doing everything that he did before.

“Later that night he sent me something jokey, and the next day something that I’d been trying out in sparring, ‘This is how it should look’, so then I knew he just wanted to be normal. He didn’t want it to be any different. Then I’d send him something jokey back; then we were back and forth. So, yeah, it’s about being as normal as possible.”

To listen to Jonas speak of compartmentalising the devastating news is to be tempted to watch her, post-fight, resist tears at the conclusion of her defeat by Price and conclude that what was at risk of being released at that moment was the emotion she had harboured since learning of her trainer’s condition as much as that that inevitably comes with the likely realisation that at the age of 40 her career could be at an end.

One of the questions she had been asked to answer from the ring surrounded the fact that Gallagher had long spoken of wanting her to retire – and the fact that there existed a wider awareness of that similarly said so much.

“I think it’s easier to put your mind on fighting and not thinking about it, and that’s one thing that boxers are probably good at,” she had said to BoxingScene. “Hiding your emotions; hiding how you’re feeling, and not letting your face show it. I am a deep thinker at certain things, but I can switch myself off, and that’s good and bad. 

“But I’ll have a bit more time to think about it and process it [post-fight]. We need alone time to process things sometimes. I don’t like the noise of everybody else. I like to be in my own feelings and experience it for meself.

“One hundred per cent [the news has motivated me further]. I don’t really need extra motivation – I’m always motivated for meself and to prove meself right and to prove Joe right. But it just adds fuel to the fire.”

It was in January 2024 against Mikaela Mayer and under Gallagher’s guidance that Jonas, long after she had been dismissed as in decline, earned the finest victory of her career. With Friday’s victory Price – and the day may yet come when beating Jonas is considered her finest hour – inherited the status of finest welterweight in the world.

“When I first turned round and said everyone’s jumping the gun with this fight it was because I hadn’t told Natasha [about my diagnosis],” Gallagher said to BoxingScene. “At that point I was going under the knife and I’d be out for six weeks, so Tasha wouldn’t be here [fighting Price on Friday]. But once we found out there was a liver problem that’s worse, and put me on chemo, it allowed me… ‘Oh, brilliant, I’m not going under the knife ‘till May, so Tasha, we’ll get you done; Lawrence, you can do’. 

“I was supposed to have the second round of chemo[therapy] when I was in Riyadh, and asked them to move it ‘cause I had Mo fighting, but it’s managed to move for Lawrence as well, so I’m happy about that. I don’t know how else you’re supposed to be.”

The super featherweight Mohammed Alakel won his third of three fights on that occasion on February 22 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Jonas-Price followed on March 7 in London; Lawrence Okolie will fight Richard Riakporhe in Manchester on April 5.

“I’ve just said to everyone, ‘We’ve got to get on with it down at the gym’,” Gallagher continued, willingly talking about it but because he had been asked. “Obviously a few of them are upset but we’ve got to get on with it and move on with it. ‘If there’s anything to tell, I’ll tell you’, but it’s just business as usual. We’ve got fights to win this year inside, and now outside, of the ring, and that’s just a mindset. It’s been a good start this year. Billy Deniz won; Mo’s just won out in Saudi; Natasha’s here; I’m flying out Monday for Lawrence. I’m just cracking on – business as usual.

“When I got diagnosed in November I didn’t tell no one ‘till Christmas, because I didn’t want to put it on anyone. In the new year I started telling people. I only told 17, 18 people. Half in the gym knew – half didn’t – and people close to me. When I did the [public] statement I felt it was controlling me. We were in the changing room for Joe Cooper. I was in agony. Some people were going, ‘What’s up with Joe? He’s half bent over’, and suddenly I thought, ‘This is controlling me’, so I wanted to put it out there so that it wasn’t controlling me. 

“I’d got a group of 17, 18 people that I’d told – it hit them a little bit more then, because they felt they were being very protective of me, but now they were reading it it was like it was real. As long as it’s out there, everyone knows, and we’ll just get on with it, and that’s it.

“What’s killed me more is people that have messaged me on social media – I don’t know them – strangers who’ve taken 10 minutes from their day to tell me about uncles, their grandmas, their mums, their brothers’ story, and the medication they took, and the links to get the medication and everyone else. I’ve personally responded to all of them.”

If there existed any justice in their professions, Jonas and Gallagher would have emerged with victory on Friday evening. If there existed justice in the world Gallagher would not be battling cancer and his battle would not have been complicated by his commitment to his fighters; if there existed justice in the world, perhaps there would be no such thing as cancer at all. 

At the very least the most dedicated and loyal of trainers and professionals would no longer be experiencing the pain that first alerted those around him in the dressing room he previously mentioned. For those supporting him and for Gallagher himself there is, at least, some consolation in the knowledge that speaking publicly about his condition has proved for him a relief, and that he can prepare Okolie to fight Riakporhe with as few distractions as possible, and in the event of victory help secure for his heavyweight further rewards.

“I just felt it was controlling me,” he said when describing the relief he had come to feel, having also wanted to spread awareness of his condition as a consequence of only learning that he had cancer when it was advanced as it was. “I couldn’t have it control me, and I just want it to be like normal. 

“In the gym; training; fight; press conference; everything else. If you like me or don’t like me, I don’t want you pitying me – just let me be me. I am who I am and I don’t know to change for it, and it’s business as usual. 

“When I went back for the second cycle [of chemotherapy] this week I felt [the same pain] again. It’s just what you have to deal with, isn’t it? So that’s it.”