Fabio Wardley: ‘If Daniel Dubois lands clean, I’ll shake it off and come back with a flurry’

Fabio Wardley grins at the prospect of violence.

He knows that, for the first defense of his WBO heavyweight title, he is up against one of the division’s heaviest hitters on Saturday night in Manchester.

In Daniel Dubois, he meets a former champion who has knocked out 21 of his 22 victims.

Yes, he has lost three times, but he has also notched big wins with the scalps he has taken.

Fireworks are expected when the two punchers collide at the Co-op Live, to the extent that promoters Queensberry have dubbed the bill ‘Don’t Blink.’

Wardley knows what is expected, and asked how he will feel when Dubois lands one of his big bombs, he smiles and replies: “I think you’ll see a lot of me of what you’ve seen before, when opponents have connected. Either I give you a little nod to say, ‘Yeah, cool. If that’s the game we’re playing, no worries. Let’s go.’ Or look, I’ll shake it off and come back with my own flurry of punches. You’re not just going to get one free shot off and I’m going to run away and I’m going to be on the other side of the ring. I’m going to turn around and go for you one way or another. You’re not going to get away with a free shot and I’m going to get hit and be in awe, ‘Oh god, this guy hits well hard, I’m going to back out of the situation.’ I’m going to knuckle up and come after you.”

Wardley brings his own heavy artillery. He’s knocked out 19 of his 20 victims, and in his last three fights he sent Frazer Clark to the shadow realm, turned the tables on a marauding Justis Huni and stunned leading contender Joseph Parker.

Trained by Ben Davison, who notably trained Anthony Joshua ahead of his defeat to Dubois a couple of years ago, Wardley has at least had consistency in the corner.

While Dubois had Don Charles in the corner for his last fight, a stoppage to Oleksandr Usyk last summer, and – indeed – Charles will be in the corner on Saturday, he had a spell with Tony Sims in between.

But Wardley is not looking for positives or advantages in camp personnel. He is concerning himself only with what he does. Yes, he and the team have been looking at Dubois footage, but he’s studied just as much of his own tapes in his quest of improvement as he has his opponent.

“Tony Sims, Don Charles, he could be with two coaches, no coach, I couldn’t give a shit,” Wardley said. 

Much of Wardley’s learning has been on the job. It has been well documented that his only experience pre turning pro was a few white-collar bouts.

To that end, his inexperience compared to decorated stars from the amateur system only enhanced his desire to prove others wrong and catch up to the competition.

“I think it’s been important to me because I guess it forced me, in a sense, very early on in my career [it] made me realise the gap, and made me realise that I had a lot of making up to do, even before I turned professional, but once I started jumping in with pros and things like that, I realised very, very quickly that there was a large gap between me and them, and the only way to shorten that gap was through just sheer workrate and dedication and commitment, and just putting it in, and chucking myself in the deep end at any possible opportunity, whether that be with sparring partners or fights or whatever it was, but trying to gain as much experience as I can in a short period of time. So when it comes to 10 years later, like we are, I’m not out of my depth at all. Going into a fight like this, I’ve done 10-rounders, 12 rounds, big fights, big occasions, I’ve ticked off all the milestones, so nothing’s like a deer-in-headlight situation where I’m new to it.”
He has sparred rounds with the likes of Oleksandr Usyk – in several camps in Ukraine – with Tyson Fury and with Anthony Joshua.

He even did rounds, perhaps as much as a decade ago, with Dubois.

Little can be read into that, though it’s clear Dubois got the better of them given the accounts of both fighters. But that was understandable. Wardley had been beating up bankers. Dubois had been on Team GB.

“I’d either been pro for a little while or just turned pro,” Ipswich’s Wardley recalled.

“It was back when he was with [manager and trainer] Martin Bowers at Peacock and the old Peacock [in Canning Town] as well. That’s where the sparring sessions happened, so many, many years ago.”
Wardley is modest and humble, so at no point back then did he think he and Dubois would be sharing a ring for a portion of the world heavyweight title. 

“Back then, again, my goals or the heights I was aiming, especially back then, were nowhere near what I've achieved currently, which is a funny one,” he explained.

“At that stage, I was just kind of almost happy to be here in a sense, just happy to be mixing it with some top-level guys and sharing the ring with them.”
He did, however, believe Dubois was capable of big things. He has no problem admitting that now.

“After sparring with him, I definitely had him down for being successful because even back then,” Wardley said. “Even though I was older than him, I think he was maybe 19, 20 maybe? So I was a young lad and I was like, knowing how early he started and knowing a bit of his history and stuff, after speaking to the guys around him, I thought, ‘Yeah, one way or another, he’s going to be destined to kind of achieve something in the sport, definitely.’”

It is charitable to say that at that same stage, the odds of Wardley going into a fight with Dubois as the defending champion would be long.

But at every point, Wardley backed himself and eventually put his career in recruitment firmly in the rearview mirror.

While there is a great sense of anticipation about what Wardley-Dubois will offer, the fight Wardley has coveted since his coronation has been with divisional No. 1 Usyk.

Instead, the Ukrainian has opted for another path – against a kickboxer later this month – in an attraction bout in Egypt.

But, should Wardley win, he will press his claims to fight Usyk.

So will promoter Frank Warren, who also promotes Agit Kabayel and Moses Itauma, and both of them are knocking on the Usyk door.

Wardley might have been greener than grass when he sparred Usyk, but he showed him enough to be invited back a couple more times.

“But, yeah, look,” Wardley continued. “There’s going to be a stark difference between the Fabio Wardley of eight years ago and this one. A big, big change. A massive change. I think we’ve seen at least over the last sort of two, three fights as well that there’s been improvements, been changes, been adjustments, and I’ve been doing that throughout my whole career as well.”

He is more than comfortable saying he has learned on the job, too. It has been risky and a very public education, but it has stood him in good stead. 

And should Usyk take another direction in his fight after Rico Verhoeven, Wardley would be in the sweepstakes for the winner of the proposed bout between Fury and Joshua later in the year, should it happen.

“Don’t get wrong, Usyk is still number one for me, irrespective, if you laid out all three of those guys as an option, Usyk would always be top of the tree, because he is undefeated, he is the one running the game at the moment,” Wardley said.

“One thing you know about me is that I always want to test myself against the best, the unquestionable best out there, the best available. So I would always pick him, but yeah, if another situation, another circumstance arises where he makes himself unavailable, or it doesn’t come together, or whatever else, then yeah, then I’d take one of those guys, whether it be AJ, whether it be Fury, I’d be happy to.”