If he wants to be world champion in the next three years he's going to have to jump straight into British title action I don't see the sense in that. He should do it gradually, move up in class slowly but surely. It's one thing having the ability, but you've got to handle the ability He seems a sensible lad, though. He says he wants to retire at 25 and he's on the right lines. You don't want to go on for years and years."Which begs the obvious question: for how long does Hatton himself intend to stick around?"Maybe three more years I'd like to think there's a lot I can do afterwards. I drive a BMW X5, and I have my box at City, but I'm not a Flash Harry by any stretch of the imagination.

I like to keep a low profile."It suits Hatton that he is not even the most hyped boxer in the Greater Manchester area, now Amir Khan is on the road to riches But he offers the youngster some cautionary advice "He says he wants to be world champion by 21 I wouldn't advise him to do that. But eventually I sat down with my dad and said, 'Listen, dad, this is getting [to be] a joke'. So I bought a house 10 minutes away, still close to what I like to call my kind of people."And it's not some flash place with a massive driveway. He couldn't fight for toffee."Hatton is close to his parents, so close that he only moved from under the parental roof a few months ago."I'd been world champion for nearly five years, made 15 defences, and I was still living in the box room at my mam and dad's. It's a lovely house, and I've got my games room, my snooker table, my plasma screens, but it suits my character very well.

I had it so made there that I just never felt the need to move out. His brother Matthew, too, has become a boxer, with a couple of area titles to his name at welterweight and light-middleweight, yet apart from a distant forebear called Slattery who was a bare-knuckle fighter, football rather than boxing dominates their genes. Indeed Hatton himself was on City's books until forced to make the choice between the beautiful game and the noble art."I sometimes wonder whether I chose right when I see Wayne Rooney earning 60 grand a week, and not getting smacked in the nose to do so," he says. And, ironically enough, I add, Rooney comes from a boxing family."That's right, yeah I don't know where I got it from It certainly wasn't my dad. But if I win this, there will obviously be some very, very big pay days."Yet he would also pay a price, in the form of burgeoning fame, for becoming undisputed world champion. How big?"That's for me to know and others to wonder," he says, with the ghost of a smile "There's only Frank Warren, me and my father who know.