He’s a wealthy individual so why doesn’t he stand up and say, ‘Look, you supported me so I support you’?”Nelson says that these days he and Hamed have nothing to do with each other “But I sometimes wonder what is going on in his head. I disapprove of his conduct in how he dealt with the split with Brendan Ingle and Frank Warren, and his attitude towards the guys in the gym. We had good times together.”I knew how hard he trained when he was with Brendan but I don’t know about now. I hear he is more interested in sitting around the pool than going out for a run. To my mind he is now surrounded by people who don’t really understand him, or the game.”My gut feeling is that he won’t fight again. He had a rematch clause in his contract before he was beaten by Barrera but he didn’t exactly react the same way as Lennox Lewis did after his defeat, demanding another chance and saying, ‘I will fight him again tomorrow Let’s get it on’ He knows Barrera has his number. In my opinion his hunger and desire is no longer what it was.”Nelson’s condemnation of his old mate is typically forthright.

The 34-year-old doyen of British boxing, who has fought 53 times in a 15-year career, 26 of them title fights, may have pulled the occasional punches in the ring, but never out of it. He has supped liberally on the game’s alphabet soup, and at London’s York Hall on Saturday he makes the ninth defence of his World Boxing Organisation world cruiserweight championship against, would you believe, an opponent named Napoleon. One Napoleon Tagoe, that is, a 28-year-old US-based Ghanaian who has won 21 of his 24 contests.After that he will be moving up to heavyweight, and reckons he can get to the British title before Audley Harrison. Nelson had less than kindly words for the Olympic super-heavyweight champion’s world title prospects when Harrison turned pro and his opinion hasn’t changed much.”He’s only been in the game for five minutes, but the way he conducts himself and goes about things seems disrespecting to those of us like myself who have been around for a long time and worked hard. He is more or less saying we are idiots, and that he can do it the easy way That’s why I am not too sweet on him.

Not only would he happily take on the likes of Harrison or the South African Frans Botha (a that match promoter Warren may have in mind for February) but he would have “no qualms at all” about stepping into the ring with Mike Tyson. “He’s a lot stronger than me, a lot more aggressive, but I would totally outbox him, because brains will always beat brawn.”Nelson has fought heavyweights earlier in his career, not always successfully, but claims: “I am a totally different fighter today and I will improve even more over the next 18 months. I am sparring regularly in the gym with guys of 18 stone and more than holding my own.” In fact, his gym-mates call him “The Pensioner” because he is due to draw on his investments in two months’ time, when he will be 35.As far as sport is concerned this is no one-eyed Nelson. He recently took ownership of a horse, not a racing nag but one equipped for showjumping.