English light heavyweight champion, Troy Jones, is getting ready to make the first defense of his title against Michael Stephenson.

Jones, 11-0 (6 KOs), and his trainer, Lee Beard, have been working away in the gym and on the small halls, building experience and adding layers to his game. Now, they are ready to show exactly what they have been working on.

The fight will take place in Jones' hometown of Birmingham on the undercard of the highly anticipated flyweight clash between Sunny Edwards and Galal Yafai.

Beard won’t be unleashing the final, fully formed version of Jones onto television screens on November 30 but the opportunity to perform on such a big platform is another welcome, useful step in the 26 year-old’s progression. 

“Troy's a very tough kid. Big, big heart and, mentally, he’s very strong but he lacked in a few areas that you never know how far that can go with somebody. Especially when you pick up the reins a bit later on, not as a younger 15, 16, 17-year-old. Sometimes they can be a bit more set in their ways,” Beard told BoxingScene. 

“He works really hard. He's never not been in the gym. When I need him in the gym, if it's seven days a week, he'll be here.

“His work ethic, coupled with the way that he is mentally and physically towards his craft is important. The learning side of things is it's going to be always ongoing but he's got to a stage now where he can do a bit of everything.”

Beard is a technical coach who preaches the importance of perfecting the details that sometimes go unseen.

Whether his fighters are working at close quarters or at long range, whether they are involved in a frantic, high contact fight or a slow tactical battle, they are taught to hold their shape, set traps and recognise and capitalize on even the slightest changes in momentum. 

Many will place a false ceiling on Jones, writing him off as a route one fighter who will please the crowd but come unstuck when he fights an opponent capable of drawing his sting and keeping him at bay. If any of his future opponents make the mistake of falling into that trap, they will get a nasty surprise.

Anyone who spends years training with Beard is going to have developed a style which requires a much more complete set of tools to unpick than a jab and a gas tank.  

“My thing with everybody is that whether you're on the front foot all the time or you like to be on the back foot boxing, you’ve got to be covering all bases,” he said. “You’ve got to be comfortable in every area if you can. Depending on where you are in that ring, you just need to be comfortable and able to either defend from there or get your own stuff going and work from there,” Beard said. 

“Troy does like being on the front foot but my kind of main style - if you want to call it that - is to come forward and hold the middle. I like my fighters to kind of hold the center, work from there and box off the front foot but to do it behind the IQ and defense. Draw out leads and set up attacks. Even if you’re not so much setting it up at that point, you know that you're breaking that person down and you'll know what you're looking for. It could come three or four rounds down the road.

“So getting that into Troy's head, being patient and chipping away at things was kind of hard at first. Even though he was willing to learn, he has an urgency to over-engage and then boom, red mist and then away you go.”

Jones still likes nothing more than to dig his toes into the canvas and fight but he has adapted well to Beard’s method and has slowly built a style of his own. He put in a career best performance against Leon Willings to win the English title August and whilst he will never lose the belief that he can’t be beaten in a toe to toe scrap, he has realized that he can improve his odds greatly by choosing when to initiate a trade off and when to bide his time.

Beard has been making sure Jones realizes that all out war should be a fall back option rather than the prime objective. 

“Now, you can switch him up real quick. Whether you want to just stay on his jab, be more mid to long, stay a bit more off, have a walk around, sit off more and just walk around the ring feinting and just passing time a little bit,” Beard said. “Get your timing back and then start getting back on the front foot. He knows now that he can do those things and not be under pressure thinking, ‘I've got to do more.’

“He's not going to lack for balls or anything like that, he's got that in abundance. Now he understands that you've got to be more educated. You can't just go out there and have a fight because there's always someone going to be a little bit better at that than you so you've got to then go to Plan B.”

John Evans has contributed to a number of well-known publications and websites for over a decade. You can follow John on X