As a long awaited grudge match nears it’s February 19th endgame, British rivals Amir Khan and Kell Brook show up for a conversation with Johnny Nelson in Sky Sports’ latest installment of The Gloves Are Off. As you might expect this edition of the show might have the most tension we’ve seen since Carl Froch vs George Groves, so should certainly make for a few laughs if nothing else.
What will happen once the opening bell ring is still to be determined, but what we can see from this head-to-head is that Amir Khan has an uncanny knack for winding up Kell Brook, and took plenty of enjoyment in doing exactly that in this instance.
The conversation between Khan and Brook started off with the logical question as to why this fight has taken so long to come together. Khan would rattle off a list of reasons as to why the timing wasn’t just right before, which clearly irked Brook who says he’s been actively chasing down this fight for as many years as he can remember.
“I’m just so happy that before we do leave the sport, hang the gloves up, the fans will get to see me and him fight each other,” Brook said.
Khan would then take his cue to start winding up Brook by asking why he thinks he’s been ducking him when he’s been facing some of the best fighters in the sport in Canelo Alvarez and Terence Crawford.
“I’m looking at you in your eyes now,” Khan said. “I’m the one who sent my guy to your team to say ‘let’s make the fight happen.’ No one ever come knocking at my door...it was my team that had go knocking at their door and said ‘let’s make the fight happen.’”
Of course with Khan and Brook picking up steam in their back-and-forth bickering, Nelson wanted to take things all the way back to the genesis of their rivalry, all stemming from an amateur sparring session with different accounts of what really took place that day.
“When it comes to sparring in England camp, when it gets heated up they let it be.” Khan recounted. “Obviously I was the #1 in the country, I was the who was qualified, I was the one who won the world championships, and then they put this kid in front of me. Kell Brook at the time was a young kid — they put him in the ring, man-schooled him, put him in his place, man-schooled him, get the next guy in there. And that’s what it was, because that’s the way I used to roll...Kell got a good tasting of a beating and after that you never heard from Kell Brook.”
Then, when Brook was asked how much is at stake for him in this fight and what a loss to Khan would mean to him, he responded quite candidly about his personal feelings on the match.
“(A loss is) unthinkable for me because it’s been talked about that much and I’d have to walk with my head down for the rest of my life,” Brook said. “He knows this as well, there’s a lot of pressure of this fight because of how long it’s been going on...this is bragging rights to the maximum.”
That, of course, would hardly be the end of things, as both Khan and Brook would continue to engage each other in a war or words before they meet in the ring this weekend — for which we’ll naturally have full live coverage. In the meanwhile, check out the full video segment in the link above!
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