Chris Eubank Jr was desperate for a pee.

It was the day after his epic victory on points over Conor Benn in April, and he was in hospital recovering. Eubank Jr had been suffering with an unbearable headache, his face swollen almost beyond recognition and a small plastic tube emerging from his left hand and connected to a bag of fluids.

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Dragging himself from his bed and into the bathroom, Eubank Jr stood over the toilet and waited. But nothing happened. His bladder was full to bursting but his body could not – would not – let go.

“That’s how dehydrated I was,” he told Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast a few weeks after the fight with Benn. “My body would not let any fluids go – it was holding onto everything… (it was) complete dehydration.”

Chris Eubank and Conor Benn’s first fight was brutal (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

The damage done to Eubank Jr was partly a result of the brutality of the fight with Benn — who had come up two weight classes to make the fight, and had also been taken to hospital for precautionary checks in the aftermath — but also what had gone on in the build-up.

In a bid to make the weight for the non-title middleweight bout, Eubank Jr had subjected himself to an extreme form of ‘cutting’ — the term given to the controversial and occasionally dangerous process by which boxers lose weight to make themselves eligible to fight at a certain weight division.

It had involved essentially draining his body of fluid to meet the 160lbs weight limit and had sparked grave concerns over his wellbeing, most prominently from his father, former world champion Chris Eubank Sr, who told his YouTube channel in June that his son had been “killing himself” to make the weight.

Eubank Sr had advised his son not to attempt a rematch but, on Saturday, he will meet Benn again at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium under the same conditions. And, once more, there are fears about what the impact could be.

Boxing rules state that fighters must make the relevant weight for their bout by the time they weigh in the day before their bout, a timetable that was introduced in the early 1980s.

In most cases, competitors can then put on as much weight as they wish before the start of their fight, by both rehydrating with fluids and eating. In the case of tomorrow’s fight, a clause in Eubank Jr’s contract states that he can only put on an additional 10lbs between his weigh-in at 11am this morning and the re-weigh-in on S