Twenty-four hours before Fabio Wardley and Daniel Dubois produced the most brutal fight of the year, knocking years off their careers in the process, a talkSPORT shock jock readjusted his thick-rimmed glasses, failed to contain a smirk, and asked them both: “Are either one of you two going to be landlords, or are you just squatters waiting for Moses Itauma to come along and take possession?”
Yes, that’s right. The day before they were both called “warriors” and “heroes”, Wardley and Dubois were called “squatters” by a man whose own position in boxing – this abandoned, derelict house – ironically owes a lot to the “squatter” mindset.
It’s true. Having happened upon an open window, Simon Jordan, the man in question, wasted no time entering the property. Then, once inside, he realised that there was no owner and sensed that all previous occupants had long since cleared out. To make sure of it, he shouted at the top of his voice and heard himself echo through the house, ricocheting off the walls and ceilings of each empty room. Soon he came to enjoy the company of his own voice, so kept shouting and shouting as loudly as he could. Without opposition, he was of course free to yell whatever he wanted, so he did, sometimes yelling about subjects completely alien to him and in which he had no expertise. Even when he broke wind, there was no reason to apologise or blame anyone else for leaving a smell. He could instead grab an empty jar and indulge in one of his favourite pastimes: capturing the smell to sniff at a later date.
Wardley and Dubois, meanwhile, were the latest guests in the House of Jordan. They arrived as a couple last Friday, both topless having just weighed in, and were immediately interrogated by the host for his own entertainment. It was, in effect, a verbal frisking at the door. Both heavyweights knew it was coming, yet the timing of it, just 24 hours before a fight, was hardly ideal. Though neither of them had to make weight, the idea of spending 12 minutes being grilled by a talkSPORT pundit, any talkSPORT pundit, could be deemed a torture worse than making weight. It even had a name, this form of torture: The Cauldron.
“The object or the aim is to create a little bit of intrigue, show something different,” said Jordan when asked to explain the point of The Cauldron on DAZN. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful but most of the interviews leading up to the fight, 24 hours out, are a little anodyne. They’re asking formulaic questions.
“Insofar as I’ve got a job here, my motivation is not to be disrespectful but to be bold and fearless; not to engender a Deontay Wilder moment again, but to try and get the fighters to show something different, get beneath the veneer, and see if we can find out something that maybe gets them at it a little bit but doesn’t create maybe an ‘exit stage left’ for one of them. There are no real original questions in the world. I’ll ask questions that can push it and maybe we can see one of them blink or give a different vantage point than we’ve seen in the buildup.”
Had The Cauldron taken place six weeks before the fight, or even two, much of what Jordan said in his attempt to explain its merits would have carried weight. However, the issue last Friday was not so much Jordan’s approach, which was typically eloquent and confrontational, but instead the timing of it. Say what you want about “selling” the fight, or getting boxers to open up when at their most vulnerable and volatile, but scheduling something like The Cauldron on the eve of a big fight is the move of someone either oblivious to how boxers feel during fight week or, worse, of the belief that how a boxer feels during fight week should be secondary to the pursuit of content and clicks. In a word, it smacked of disrespect.
In fact, Daniel Dubois spoke for us all when he said nothing to Jordan, barely acknowledging the questions or his presence. Whereas Wardley, the champion, at least played along and danced on command, Dubois never once answered one of Jordan’s questions directly, nor did he incite any exchange with his opponent, as many would have hoped. Rather, he said, quite unequivocally, “The talking’s done now, I’m just ready for war.” He then later said: “Let’s go, man. The talking’s done. Let’s fight.”
In fairness, Jordan never pressed him. He may have done so if The Cauldron had taken place at a cooler time – like six weeks out – but even Jordan, vulnerable in a squatting position, knew not to push his luck in the presence of two 6 '5 heavyweight boxers with fists clenched and shirts off. Indeed, one wonders how this experiment might have transpired had the two topless boxers on either side of Jordan been dying of thirst having just cut weight. Maybe in that instance the thought of spending 12 minutes in the company of Simon Jordan, or anyone for that matter, would have been considerably less appealing. Perhaps boredom and awkwardness would, in that scenario, be the least of our concerns. Jordan’s, too.
Thankfully, although the concept itself leaves a lot to be desired, they got their first victims right. In Wardley, you had one of the more amiable and articulate fighters in the game; someone grateful for all his opportunities having progressed from the white-collar circuit to become WBO heavyweight champion. You then also had Dubois, a man so dialled in or checked out – you decide – that whatever was asked of him on Friday would generate only the same pre-packaged response, often short and generic. In that respect, Jordan was as safe as he could wish to be. He could even insult them both and find only that one saw the funny side and the other had missed the comment entirely.
That, for better or worse, was the dynamic in Manchester last week. Despite the big sell, nobody really listened, nobody really cared, and not a shred of insight was to be found. This was neither the fault of the fighters, the ones answering the questions, nor Jordan, the one asking them. In fact, when in the right place, Jordan has proven his value as an intelligent interviewer of boxers and often shown a propensity to ask the kinds of questions others tend to shirk. His recent interview with Rico Verhoeven, for example, was well worth your time. With Verhoeven, a kickboxer set to challenge Oleksandr Usyk next weekend, Jordan started out sceptical before finding himself enchanted by the Dutchman’s charisma and warming to him – if not his chances of winning. He asked all the right questions, raised his eyebrows at the appropriate times, and managed to convey his admiration for Verhoeven, as a speaker, while at the same time staying true to his belief that Verhoeven would be well out of his depth on May 23, as a boxer.
The thing is, that Verhoeven interview took place four weeks ago – two months before he was due to box Usyk – and therefore everything about it made sense. The poking and prodding made sense, the relaxed demeanour of Verhoeven made sense, and the respect between interviewer and subject made sense. It was, two months out, just a chat. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Cauldron, on the other hand, is something else. It is not a chat, nor does it purport to be. Instead, The Cauldron is yet another example of how a serious thing can be shamelessly reduced to banter and content in the eyes of businessmen, outsiders, and “creators”. Call it what you want, but The Cauldron was never designed to have two boxers open up or add another dimension to a fight’s narrative. It was merely an attempt to manufacture clickbait, that’s all. Ideally, one of the two heavyweights would say something or do something with viral potential and Jordan, the agitator, would skedaddle just in time. So long as the transgression, be it verbal or physical, didn’t jeopardise the fight, everybody would then exit The Cauldron feeling rather smug and clever. They would bump fists. They would take to their phones. They would locate the fire emoji and capitalise the chaos: “Jordan causes Wardley and Dubois to FUME when he calls them both SQUATTERS!!!”
Perhaps, in the end, the attention economy demands this approach and all boxing is doing is following the pack and giving the people what they believe they want. Perhaps having something called “Gymskin” “drop the shoulder” to celebrate Zak Chelli’s upset win over David Morrell at the weekend is exactly the sort of content and insight we deserve in 2026. We deserve it for lacking taste and standards. We deserve it for sacrificing quality for convenience. We deserve it, most of all, for letting just about anyone enter our home and not even asking the question: “What are you doing here?”
