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Chris Eubank Jr has spent his entire life seeking the approval of his father and former world champion Chris Eubank Sr.

But in the days before the biggest fight of his career against Conor Benn – a revival of the family feud which started with their fathers 35 years ago – Eubank Jr cut an isolated figure.

At the final news conference before that grudge match at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in April, Eubank Jr spoke about the “pain” of no longer having a relationship with his dad.

They had, at that point, been estranged for several years with Eubank Sr criticising the match-up.

Eubank Sr also publicly called his son a “disgrace” after slapping Benn with an egg during a face-off.

“I’m going to stand in your corner? You must be mad,” Eubank Sr said.

“I will never be in your corner.”

A reunion between the pair looked impossible as the bout drew closer until Eubank Sr made the first move – reaching out via text message just 24 hours before the fight.

“I called him and he wanted to see me, I told him ‘I can’t take any negativity’,” Eubank Jr said.

“He said ‘no, I have nothing negative to say, I want to be next to you’.

“Regardless of what has been said and done, I’m always going to greet him with open arms.”

Eubank Sr had seen his son come under verbal attack – with his father’s absence used as a weapon – and felt he needed to act.

The pair met that night and kept their reconciliation under strict wraps.

The first anyone knew of it was when Eubank Sr emerged out of a taxi backstage- and elevator for those watching on TV – beside his son. The boxing world at ringside and at home witnessing a now famous sporting moment.

“You didn’t have any support, that was a very dangerous fight and I’m so glad that I cut off and away from you for so long and that I said there was no way I’m coming to that fight,” Eubank Sr said.

“I turned up at the last minute to give you the last piece of energy.”

The presence of his father on fight night clearly had a positive impact as Eubank Jr won by unanimous decision.

Eubank Sr will be back by his son’s side for the rematch on Saturday.

“Him in my corner gave me that boost, that extra per cent to get the job done,” Eubank Jr said.

“When it truly counted, he was there for me.”

Their relationship first became strained in 2019, shortly after losing a middleweight title fight against George Groves, when Eubank Jr wanted to “walk his own path” as he reached a crossroads in his career.

Eubank Sr, who had trained and mentored his son at each and every turn, was “deeply hurt” by the decision to part ways.

“That caused us to separate and it shouldn’t have,” Eubank Jr said.

“Boxing and father and son should be two separate things.”

They grew further apart in 2021 when Eubank Sr’s son, Sebastian, died after a heart attack.

“It consumed my father and it affected me deeply, but I think I was able to deal with it a lot better,” Eubank Jr said.

“Everybody grieves in a different way, for him the passing of my brother it widened the gap and separated us even more.

“He wasn’t able to figure out how to deal with that loss and still have a working relationship with the rest of his children.

“We didn’t talk for a long time.”

Sebastian had become a father just a month before his passing in Dubai and Eubank Jr quickly assumed a father-like role to his nephew Raheem, having met for the first time at the funeral.

“All I have to do is pick up my phone, look at a picture of Raheem and I just light up and I’m happy for the rest of the day. I don’t know why,” Eubank Jr said.

After beating Benn in an enthralling contest, Eubank Jr was taken to hospital for what his promoter Ben Shalom called “precautionary checks”.

Eubank Sr spent “two nights and three days” by his side.

“He doesn’t leave the hospital and he was sleeping in the hallway,” Eubank Jr said.

“Was I expecting that? To be completely honest, no.

“We’d been estranged for four years and when I saw that I knew ‘Ok, he still loves me. He’s still my dad’.”

In the aftermath of such a gruelling bout, Eubank Sr asked his son to consider retirement, but Eubank Jr isn’t ready to hang the gloves up yet as he prepares for a new chapter.

In a poignant moment in the film, Eubank Jr tells his father he will soon be a grandfather to twin boys.

Eubank Jr says he wants to do things differently to his father.

“I want to be the type of father that my kids can come to and talk about anything. I couldn’t do that with my old man. He was too strict, he was too disciplinarian,” Eubank Jr said.

For now, talk of boxing is off limits for the pair as they look to focus on rebuilding their relationship as father and son.

“What I want from him as a father is friendship,” Eubank Jr said.

“I want to be able to go to the cinema, go to an event or sit at a restaurant and talk about anything but boxing.

Imagine a world in which you could reinvent football.

It’s a dream, of course. Just a bit of fun. But stick with us.

What if you had the power to change any of the game’s laws and potentially bring to an end countless hours of discussion about handball, offside, video assistant referees, or anything else you want to?

In that spirit, we asked players, pundits and even referees what football could look like if we ripped up the rulebook and started afresh.

Think of it as a manifesto for reinventing the game so many of us love.

Think here about that relatively innocuous trip as an attacker is moving away from goal – or a handball decision when there’s no immediate likelihood of a goal.

The result? A penalty – and a very high chance of a goal (historically, Opta says, 78%) when no such opportunity existed.

Is it fair, for example, that Brentford were given such a high chance of scoring when Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk tapped the boot of Dango Ouattara right on the edge of the 18-yard area last month?

Is a shot from 12 yards with only the goalkeeper to beat a just punishment?

We already define an obvious goalscoring opportunity for a red card, so we’d only have to tweak this to any kind of scoring chance for a penalty.

If it’s a foul with no clear attacking impact, why not a free-kick?

Imagine when a penalty is saved or hits the woodwork and bounces back into play that the game is stopped and the ball given to the goalkeeper.

Pierluigi Collina – perhaps the most famous football referee of all time, and now head of Fifa’s referees’ committee – is already on board.

Collina argues that if the attacking team have squandered such a big chance of scoring, why should they be allowed a second or even third opportunity?

In recent campaigns an average of just under three goals a season have been scored in such circumstances, so is it really that important?

And would we want to risk losing some of the game’s most memorable moments?

Think Chloe Kelly’s 119th-minute goal for England against Italy in the semi-final of Euro 2025. Or Liverpool’s Xabi Alonso netting at the second attempt against AC Milan in their dramatic comeback in the second half of the 2005 Champions League final. Or Harry Kane’s winning goal for England against Denmark at Euro 2020.

Will VAR ever be accepted? Perhaps not in its current form, so how about adapting it to a challenge system?

You might not have heard of Fifa’s Football Video Support (FVS), which is being trialled in several leagues including Liga F – the top flight of the women’s game in Spain.

Under FVS, a coach is given two challenges per game. When they are activated, the on-field referee goes to the monitor to watch the incident back and make a decision. There isn’t a VAR poring over the footage, just a replay operator to show the incident to the referee.

Everton and England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford likes the theory.

“With VAR involved, I’d do it like cricket,” Pickford said. “They’ve got two decisions and the captain has got to make sure they review at the right time, in so many seconds. I think that would keep the speed of the game up, and keep it flowing.”

Sound good? It has its merits. The assumption is there will be better final outcomes, though trials have shown that’s not always the case, and mistakes are still made by a referee at the screen.

Match of the Day presenter Gabby Logan thinks there’s a different way of doing it.

“It’s to have a time limit on VAR,” she said. “We all agree now it’s here to stay, and it often does good things, but the time it can take is tiresome. It stops the game. People get angry with it.

“If it was 90 seconds only, I think we’d sort a lot of that out because if it’s not clear and obvious in 90 seconds, it’s not clear and obvious.”

But for former England defender Stephen Warnock, the solution is simpler – get rid of VAR.

The concept of offside is very different from its first iteration in 1863 when – a little bit like rugby – you were offside if you were in front of the ball.

Three years after its introduction, the law changed to consider the position of the defenders closest to their own goal, and it hasn’t altered much since.

But the initial idea surely wasn’t that players should be penalised for having a toe in front of the ‘offside line’? After all, you only had the judgement of the assistant.

We’re told VAR tech is uber-reliable, but we’re in the hands of AI and a VAR who has to manually confirm a frame that might not be the exact point the ball has been played anyway. And how confusing can those animations be?

So, how about ditching the microscopic tech, and just relying on a TV picture with no lines or funky graphics and an official’s eye?

That’s how it’s done in Major League Soccer – largely because of problems with wildly differing stadium configurations.

The VAR looks at the images and decides if it’s possible the assistant has got the decision wrong. If so, the referee is sent to the monitor to look. In other words, MLS judges offside at the clear and obvious threshold and not to millimetres.

Would TV companies still draw their own lines? Probably, which would undoutedly mean the controversy around offside decisions would not dissipate.

Premier League referee Anthony Taylor had a more radical suggestion.

“One of the best tournaments I refereed in was a prison officer tournament and we had no offside… and we had so many goals it was unbelievable,” he said.

If you asked a football fan to define handball a decade ago, you’d get a simple answer, like: “Ball to hand isn’t a penalty.”

Put that question to them today, and they probably wouldn’t know where to start.

Former England captain Alan Shearer pointed to some of the phraseology that has come into the football lexicon around handball as he called for change.

“Proximity… obvious position… not in an obvious position… natural,” he said. “For me, it’s pretty simple – is it deliberate handball or not?”

Some of the confusion has come from a big rewrite of the lawbook in 2019, when the considerations for handball went from just three lines to an entire page.

Referees were served with a whole menu of reasons to give handball.

The aim was to give a “clearer and more consistent definition and interpretation”. What it brought was consistently more penalties, because there were many more reasons to give one.

This idea has been kicking around for many years, with the intention that if the watch is stopped, teams can’t waste time.

The plan could be for each half to last 30 minutes, with the clock halted when the ball isn’t in play. That guarantees 60 minutes of effective playing time, and means much of the incentive to take vital seconds out of the match is removed.

Fans would actually gain rather than lose out, too, with the average ball-in-play time this season 55 minutes 05 seconds – 114 seconds down from last season.

It’s not a magic bullet, because teams who are looking to see out a lead – or hold on to a draw – could still go slowly to break up the momentum of the opposition.

For this, we turn to former Wales captain Ashley Williams.

“I would give each team at least one timeout per half, and you can use that whenever you want,” he said.

“It might be before a corner, before a free-kick, if someone’s injured. If the manager needs to get hold of their team and change something, I’d let them have a timeout like they do in other sports.”

The modern trend seems to be for teams to secure themselves an ‘unofficial’ tactical timeout by telling a goalkeeper to go down injured, though we should point out – for the avoidance of doubt – that sometimes goalkeeper injuries are genuine!

As the physio runs on, all of the outfield players head over to the technical area for a team talk. When the manager has passed on his key messages, the goalkeeper is often fine to play on.

This little interlude can change the direction of a game, and adversely impact the opposition. While they have the chance to speak to their manager too, it often is the case that they don’t need to change anything, so any team talk has less impact.

Would an allocated tactical timeout stop this? In some cases, but not all.

Arsene Wenger, when he was manager of Arsenal, often spoke about giving teams extra points to award attacking play.

It never caught on widely, though he did get his way in the pre-season Emirates Cup in the summer of 2009. There, clubs were awarded three points for a win plus an extra point for every goal scored.

Former Manchester City defender Nedum Onuoha is thinking along the same lines.

“I like the idea of a bonus point for every time you score two goals,” he said. “Instead of just getting three points, you score two goals and that’s four points. You score four goals, that’s five points.

“From an attacking perspective, you can really start to climb the ladder. You’ll see more goals in the league, which means fans would be more entertained.”

There’s another option.

Former Barcelona and Manchester United defender Gerard Pique flipped the logic earlier this year by suggesting teams should get zero points if a match ends 0-0.

Pique believes boring games would explode into life for the final 20 minutes because a 0-0 draw would give teams as many points as a 1-0 defeat.

Consider these two scenarios: a player is breaking forward and is brought down by a tactical foul, or a goalkeeper comes out of his area and boots the ball into the crowd.

Play often can’t restart instantly, because a team needs to set up. But what if a player could take a free-kick, throw-in or corner to themselves and run with the ball?

It might seem a little out there, but it would make the game faster and might even bring more goals.

Former England midfielder Danny Murphy said: “It’s your advantage, you’ve got the ball, so why do you have to pass it to somebody else so you can get the game going quickly?”

In 1996, former Fifa president Sepp Blatter wanted to increase the size of football goals by 50cm in width and 25cm in height, but didn’t have enough support.

Is it time to look again?

The size of the goals – 24ft wide and 8ft high – hasn’t changed in 150 years.

But the average height of people has increased in that time, which would suggest goalkeepers are now at an advantage.

There are two sides to this, though.

In 1875, footballs were made of hand-stitched leather, often weighed down by the rain. Today they are lightweight and made of synthetic leather and designed to aid movement through the air.