The Sky Sports episode of The Gloves Are Off between Kell Brook and bitter long-term rival Amir Khan aired this week but Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle has not seen it.

Khan and Brook – along with presenter Johnny Nelson – shared a tense 20-minute face-to-face conversation about their past and their fight, which finally takes place this weekend after a decade of hostilities and animosity.

“I haven’t watched it,” said Ingle. “I think Khan thinks he’ll make Kell lose his composure but he won’t. Mind games don’t really work with Kell. They just don’t.”

Brook has seen an awful lot in his career, but Khan seemed to push his buttons. Ingle, however, is convinced Brook will be able to stick to a plan on fight night.

“I’m pleased he [Kell]’s got this fight because if he didn’t get it, he’d probably have just packed up, so it’s come at the right time and it’s motivated him and now he’s thinking of having another one because he can do this camp again. So if he’s this good and this motivated why not do it again,” Ingle continued, saying that Brook has been enjoying training for the fight he’s always wanted.

And while Ingle knows that neither fighter are what they were in their primes, he thinks Khan’s lack of activity could be a significant problem for the Bolton star.

“Don’t forget, it’s three years in April since he [Khan] boxed Crawford [April 2019] and he boxed Billy Dib four or six months after that so he’s actually been out of the ring about two and a half years,” Ingle went on. “And when you think his last fight was really an exhibition and his last proper fight was Crawford nearly three years ago two months short of three years whereas Kell’s was a year last November [2020] it’s a long time out, and he [Khan] won’t have been in training, he won’t have been ticking over… he might have got himself fit for this.”

Brook’s most damaging fights were hard losses to Gennady Golovkin and Errol Spence. He suffered serious damage to both eye sockets but Ingle insists that things could have been different for the Spence fight had their preparation been unhindered.

“When he [Brook] boxed Spence, he was on antibiotics for 30 days, not straight but three separate incidents of 10 days of antibiotics because he got chest infections, laryngitis and all these things. It zapped him in camp at various stages and you can’t really train on antibiotics because it’s asking too much, but he did it,” Ingle explained.

“Whether that was good or not, he had to because he had to get his weight down so when you think what he put himself through to box Spence and two or three weeks [before] I was saying to the nutritionist, ‘I’m going to have to pull him out,’ and I phoned [promoter] Eddie [Hearn] and said ‘What will happen if I pull him out?’ And he said, ‘It can’t be at Brammall Lane again, he’ll probably get less money, and you know Kell, once you pull him out he might go off the radar completely.’ He [Kell] recovered in time but it’s the training up to that fight [that was affected] and I believe that if he hadn’t had that setback, he’d have beat Errol Spence but that’s another story.”

Much of the debate about this weekend’s fight is centred around who has the most left following two long, high-profile and distinguished careers.

Brook didn’t look right against Terence Crawford when swept aside in November 2020 and Ingle thinks it might have been because he didn’t work with him, choosing not to as he didn’t think there was enough time to get Kell to where he needed to be to face the pound for pound star.

“It’s like watching Liam Williams the other week,” said Ingle, who trained the Welshman for several fights until the Welshman opted to leave him for Adam Booth for his big contest with Chris Eubank a fortnight ago. “It was frustrating because I know Liam could have done better than that and he’s not chinny, no matter how hard the fight was against [Demetrius] Andrade, he was with me for three years and he never took any shots. He never had any damage in any fight, the 12 rounds he had with Andrade were the first 12 hard rounds he had in three years training with me. So his punch resistance is not going to go from that one fight or before that fight… and to say he got off the floor twice in the early rounds and got through the fight shows it could only be down to dehydration or not rehydrating properly and he’s got a good chin on him. It’s the same with Kell. It’s very uncharacteristic to get hit with a shot like he did against Crawford and he walked on to the same kind of shot [as Williams did against Eubank] and Kell take those shots all day long.”

But Brook is likely more motivated for Khan than anyone else with Ingle saying about the type of camp they’ve had, “He’d have only done it for this fight.”

He also feels he is the best coach to be guiding Brook into the fight with Khan but is unsure if this will be the end for Sheffield’s former IBF welterweight champion.

“It’s a strange life being a boxer because you’re looking for that adrenaline rush all the time and there’s going to come a time when he asks what else is he going to do [after boxing],” Ingle concluded. “So while he’s still going to do it he’ll do it but at this moment at time it’s kind of unfinished and he needs something resolved to go out on.”

BROOK ON THE FIGHT THIS WEEKEND

KHAN INTERVIEW AHEAD OF THE FIGHT