A dead boy, years of silence, a child fighting a 34-year-old and no medics to save young lives: Inside the Wild West of child combat sports - and why every parent should protect their kids from this unregulated scandal

It’s the coat and the water bottle that I’ll always remember. They belonged to Dominic Chapman, a young man who was drawn in by the slick marketing of one of the firms currently making a fortune out of unregulated ‘white collar boxing.’ He was killed by a blow to his head in the ring.

His devastated father, John, has kept those possessions exactly where he’d left them, at the dining room table of the modest family home in Worcester.

I wrote at length, three months ago, about the scandal of unregulated combat sport and the disgraceful way Dominic’s family has been treated – left to chase up insurance and to wait three years for an inquest, while a coroner pursued vital video footage from the bout organisers, which never materialised.

The boxing authorities weren’t interested. I asked England Boxing for a conversation about how their sport was being rendered unsafe. They sent me a 117-word statement and I was led to understand that an anticipated ‘report’ was being postponed pending ‘an MP roundtable’.

John Chapman urged me to report that any parent whose child is considering a form of combat sport should 'tell them no'. But with the desultory authorities apparently too busy - or too bone idle - to be shamed into action by Dominic’s death, someone else’s child has now died in unregulated combat sport.

Alex Eastwood, just like Dominic, was full of the optimism of youth. He was 15 and had just finished his GCSEs at Archbishop Beck Catholic College in Liverpool.

He could actually head into a ring with confidence, as a highly accomplished kickbox fighter. He had completed nearly three rounds of a bout at a Wigan gym when he became disorientated and collapsed with a bleed on the brain. He died in hospital two days later.

The inquest into the Alex’s death, which concluded last Thursday, conveyed what the Eastwood family’s solicitor, Jill Paterson of Leigh Day, described in court as a ‘wild west’ of fighting.

The kickboxing bout was supposed to have been ‘light contact’ and not involve heavy blows. But the inquest heard that ‘ground rules’ were agreed during social media exchanges between Alex’s coach, Daniel Wigelsworth, and Dale Bannister, the owner of the gym where the bout took place.

Wigelsworth said that ‘Alex can bang’ – meaning he can hit hard – so he and Bannister agreed to ‘let it go a bit’ – meaning, as the coroner observed, that it ‘strayed’ into a full contact match, in the ring.

Such a fight should have taken place on a mat, where a competitor stepping off allows the referee to step in, in the event of a mismatch or escalating risk. Alex’s opponent was two years older than him.

The aftermath was the most shocking part. There was no independent ringside doctor or paramedic team present because the event had been promoted as a light-contact, exhibition-style bout. Costs tended to be a consideration for such fights, one expert told the inquest. There is a desire not to eat into charity revenues.

The paramedics who arrived to treat Alex had to take him to a local Wigan hospital to get his airways cleared because they were not qualified to do so themselves, before removing him to Manchester Children’s Hospital, where surgeons were waiting to operate. Had Alex’s airways been cleared at the venue, he could have been operated on hours earlier and had a much better chance of survival.

So many shocking details spilled out of the inquest. The fact that Alex had been put in a ring with a 34-year-old in the week before he died. The fact there is neither a maximum number of rounds nor minimum periods of rest between them in unregulated fights like this.

The coroner, Michael Pemberton, has asked Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), to review the practice of unregulated fights. Nandy says she has tasked her department to explore ways of improving the safety and welfare of children in such a setting.

That appears to be more of a response than the coroner in Dominic Chapman’s case, David Reid, has received since alerting DCMS. England Boxing told me yesterday that they are ‘still waiting on DCMS to confirm a date with us’ for that ‘roundtable’. It’s been three years and two months since Dominic died.

‘The main issue is that families are putting their children into sports as something they see as positive,’ Paterson tells me. ‘They have absolutely no idea that there are dangers attached.’

When John Chapman and I were first in touch about his son’s death, his only request was that my approach remain ‘factual’. He wanted no sentimentality to cloud the message. But it must be hard for these families to feel anything but boiling rage.

A 15-year-old boy is now dead, yet still we await evidence of anything more than platitudes and apathy.

How Real are bringing Jude down a peg 

On the evidence of time I spent in the Real Madrid store on the Spanish capital's Gran Via last Friday, Jude Bellingham is bigger than Kylian Mbappe. While images of the Englishman dominate the place, there’s very little Mbappe.

Xabi Alonso hinted at his inaugural press conference as manager that Bellingham has to stop running around the pitch like he’s the only player on it and be reined in. ‘We will try to make him as efficient as possible.’

Even in Spain, there’s a sense that Bellingham and his vast ego needs bringing down a peg or two.

River's tonic for Club World Cup fog 

Struggling to feel the love for the pointless Club World Cup? Then become a River Plate fan.

The Argentines bring 17-year-old prodigy Franco Mastantuono, who’s about to sign for Real Madrid, and a beautiful commitment to youth which has seen them spend £147million on infrastructure in the past few years.

They’ve become the first Argentinian club to launch English language social media channels, so you can follow them when CWC fog clears.

Lancs need some lightning in a bottle 

An evening well spent watching Lancashire Lightning play Leicestershire Foxes in the Vitality Blast provided a reminder that the Red Rose county are struggling because they have no one remotely close to the batting quality of Keaton Jennings, who’s stepped down as captain.

But more than two months after it was announced, during a county game against Northants, that their stellar bowler had been knighted, the sign identifying the ‘James Anderson End’ hasn’t been upgraded.

Small details can speak volumes about why a club flourishes or not.

Jennings got 39 in 19 balls. Lancs lost.