TWO days to go until the Commonwealth Games open here and the gold medal for optimism goes to Terry Edwards, the England boxing team coach. Put it down to the Amir Khan effect. What is the England medal target? “Eleven golds would be good,” Edwards said, cheekily, of his 11-man squad. But seriously? “Each and every one of these lads has the potential to win a medal,” he insisted.

At the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England won seven medals, only for eight of the 12-man squad to turn professional. “We had nothing to offer them to stop them,” Edwards said. “This time we have things in place. Maybe not a wallet as big as those of the professional promoters, but we can say to James [Degale], for example, ‘We can offer you this.’ ”

Degale is a 20-year-old London middleweight whose photogenic looks and raw talent mark him out. He is among those whom the Amateur Boxing Association (ABA) will attempt to tie to its ranks by contract up until the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Medal bonuses are to be paid for the first time here and there will be other incentives beyond.

“After this tournament we hope to sit down with all our boxers here and try to broker some sort of contract with them up to Beijing,” Edwards said. “We are not going to stop them turning pro, but maybe we can hang on to them longer to fulfil their potential as amateurs.”

England gold medal-winners here will be paid £2,000, with £1,000 for silver and £500 for bronze. Although lottery funding for the ABA has dropped from a shade more than £1 million a year to about £900,000 this year and £700,000 from April, the sport’s return to free-to-air television and the growing support that Edwards has noticed from among local councils and businesses for amateur boxers have enhanced the feel-good factor. Khan, according to Edwards, has been largely responsible.

“After 2000, with Audley [Harrison, the gold medal-winner at the Sydney Olympics], the profile of amateur boxing went up but came down I think because of his attitude and the way his professional career went,” Edwards said. “But after Athens [in 2004], everybody wanted to take Amir home, every grandmother wanted to cuddle him, and we have ridden on the back of that.

“You would have thought he had won two golds from the profile he got. Audley won a gold and did not get half the publicity. Once upon a time amateur boxing was seen as a watered-down version of the professional side — fellas walking around with bent noses, cauliflower ears and talking funny — but Amir has helped change that.”

Using Harrison, the 1998 Commonwealth Games super-heavyweight champion in Kuala Lumpur, as an example of the potential rewards for patience, Edwards turned to Degale and said: “Somebody told me that Audley was offered £100,000 after Kuala Lumpur, but he stayed on two years, then it was £1 million-plus.

“I am sure that when James comes off the plane with a gold medal around his neck that there will be offers. We have to convince him that he would be selling himself short if he went pro at the moment. In two years he can develop into an Olympic champion and be offered something like Amir got.”

First, though, he needs to deliver here.