Tyrone McKenna has no hesitation in describing how he would approach his first day if he were ever unfortunate enough to end up in prison.

“100%, I would pick the biggest guy and I would knock his b———s in and show I'm the hardest man in Ireland,” McKenna said with a laugh.

“That's what it has to be. It's dog eat dog. Boxing is the same thing, it's dog eat dog. You have to prove yourself every single time.”

McKenna, 24-5-1 (7 KOs), is on the bus home from the airport when The Ring catches up with him. The 35 year-old welterweight has just landed back in Belfast after spending a second successive camp in Munich with his trainer, Tim Yilmaz.

The gregarious McKenna describes his time Germany as like serving time in prison but knows that if he is to make a success of the final stages of his career, the hard time is necessary.

He has spent his most recent stretch getting ready for this weekend’s fight with the unbeaten Harlem Eubank. The intriguing fight will be televised terrestrially in the UK by Channel 5.

“I've got that prison mentality right now going into this fight. I wish I could eat prison food, but I can't. I'm f——-g eating chicken and rice every day,” McKenna said.

“I believe it's not something to be enjoyed. I go over to Germany but I don't want to go over, ever. I kind of have to force myself to go over sometimes. But it's what I need. I need to be locked away from my family, from my kids, from my wife, from my friends.

“I'm a man that just needs to be fully focused on boxing. Obviously, I retired last year. I came back and I said to myself, ‘Look, Tyrone. You need to be away, fully dedicated in your life if you're going to do it again.’

“And that's what I'm doing. I hate every minute over in Germany. I'm solo, 24-7.

“The only time I leave the apartment is to go to the gym twice a day. I love Munich as a city, but in camp I'm not here to go out and have dinner. I’m going there to train and to work very hard.”

As McKenna says, this time last year he was retired.

A December 2023 loss to his cross city rival, Lewis Crocker, temporarily sapped his desire and the happy go lucky slugger decided it was time to to concentrate on his popular ‘Whiskey n White’ podcast.

Eight months later, he was back. His comeback didn’t go to plan - McKenna was stopped by a fifth round body shot from his old rival, Mohamed Mimoune - but rather than walking away again, he rededicated himself to his task and took himself away to Munich to prepare for an all Irish clash with Dylan Moran.

He was just a week out from the fight with Moran when the idea of snaring a fight with Eubank first entered his head.

He couldn’t believe his luck when he was selected for the high profile assignment.

“I genuinely thought he wasn't going to take it,” he said.

“I think he fought the week before I fought and I thought, ‘I’d loved to fight him.’

“There was a couple of names in my head and he was the main one that I would have loved to have fought. I think someone from his team was there for my fight and I went out and knocked the guy out in the second round. I went, ‘That's zero chance that Harlem's going to take that fight now.’

“Then, a week later, I got the phone call that Harlem Eubank wants to fight you. I was buzzing. His last name is one of the biggest names in British boxing. To fight a Eubank on a Channel 5 show, he's one of the most watched fighters in the UK because it gives him a massive, massive platform.”

Although McKenna’s 2024 included an eight month long retirement, he was still more active than the neat, tidy Eubank.

The 31 year-old endured a frustrating year. A proposed junior welterweight fight with Adam Azim fell through and he had to wait until November for his first action of the year. When it came, France’s Nurali Erdogan turned his welterweight debut into a messy, frustrating encounter for everybody involved.

McKenna is too experienced to fall into the easy trap of writing Eubank off as a protected hype job. He respects what he has seen so far, but won’t know just how good he is until Friday night.

“He's very fast. I mean, I'll give him that,” McKenna admits. “He is a very fast puncher but it's hard to gauge. I think he's quite an unknown because he's only fought cherry-picked opponents, so anyone's going to look good against them.

“I don't know actually what he's going to be like when he's got serious pressure on him. When he's got a man that's coming with my kind of experience behind him and my ring craft and I.Q. So I don't really look into the fights that he's had previously. I've obviously watched them and he's looked great in them, but that's against low-level opposition, so I don't know what he's actually like.”

If McKenna’s year ending two round war with Moran needs to be seen to be believed, Eubank’s decision over Erdogan won’t be attracting too many repeat viewings on YouTube.

McKenna has done an excellent job of marketing himself as a chaotic warlord and believes that he has been specifically chosen to inject some excitement back into Eubank’s journey after the frustrating spectacle with Erdogan, He also insists that if people are expecting to tune in to watch him walk mindlessly into Eubank’s crisp counters all night, they have wildly underestimated his capabilities.

“People are saying I'm just a workhorse and I just head forward and go for wars but the reality of it is that I'm very educated in my wars,” he said.

“The last time I fought was just an all-out war because I knew I was going to win, I knew I was going to knock him [Moran] out - I knew that for a fact - so I went out for that knockout but when I'm applying pressure, I'm thinking about setting traps.

“I'm applying pressure on purpose. I'm feinting, I'm using my ring craft and my IQ. It's not just pilling forward and throwing punches and that's why I think where a lot of people misread me and misinterpret my style. They think I'm just all guns blazing and don't have a thought going through my head where it's quite the opposite and I'm thinking and planning absolutely everything.

It is said that prison changes a man but McKenna isn’t the type to have regrets. The move to Germany might have brought about an instant change in his fortunes and opened his eyes as to what may still be possible but he wouldn’t alter anything about the way he approached the first half of his career.

“Sometimes I look back and think I could have applied myself more. But then again, I also think I was having fun at the time and I was enjoying boxing and loving it,” he said.

“I wouldn't change. I think you get away with it a lot more when you're younger. I think now that I'm older, I'm 34, I need to be more dedicated than ever because there's younger ones out there - like Harlem Eubank - who’ve got youth on their side and I need to train extra hard to compete on that level.

“So I wouldn't change what I've done in the first half of my career but now, as a new leaf, I need to really dedicate myself.”