As a battered and bruised Fabio Wardley made his way to the back following his war with Daniel Dubois in May - right eye closed shut, nose splattered, the white of his Ipswich Town-themed trunks now pink - the now-former WBO world champion had one thought and one thought only: “Get me back in.”
Wardley had just been on the losing end of a firefight that he could have had in the bag inside 15 seconds. His first-round knockdown of Dubois was followed up by another two rounds later, as the 31-year-old consigned criticism of being a slow starter to the scrapheap once and for all. Alas, it was during the third round where one sharp Dubois overhand right turned the tides. A torrent of ‘Dynamite’ punishment ensued, proving his heart beyond doubt, and Wardley was eventually stopped in the 11th.
It was a brutal way to be dealt a first career loss. But Wardley didn’t want to wallow in his failure; not for a second. Asked at what point he requested the rematch, which goes down at London’s O2 Arena this Saturday, Wardley said: “Immediately. I was sat in the changing room and I think I was asking for Frank [Warren, his promoter]. I was like, ‘Someone go get Frank and tell him we're doing this again in November,’ immediately.
“What else am I gonna do? Just go, ‘No,’ and run off in a different direction or, ‘No, I think I need two or three fights to build me back up. I need my confidence back.’ F*** that. No. Get me back in. I'll sort it out myself. I'll right the wrongs. I'll fix it, and we'll go again.”
Wardley was back in the gym within two weeks. As bad as the optics were, he insists it was business as usual within hours of the fight being waved off. He was back on dad duty by 4am on Sunday morning. “I know it sounds really weird to say, but I was fine,” he said. “I had a swollen eye and a cut nose, and I was a little bit tired and whatever else. But overall, I was fine. I still had a lump of a baby on my shoulder bouncing around, and I stood there for half an hour getting her down and whichever else. I was still able to turn up in that capacity.”
He is expecting another child in December, giving him a bit more breathing room post-fight than he had for his first-born, who arrived a week after his win over Justis Huni in June 2025. He says neither were planned: “They just keep popping up!”
Some fighters use their children as a motivation. Others become more aware of their health and the perils of fighting in parenthood. Wardley seemed to be falling into the latter camp after the insane Huni fight, saying he wanted to avoid being in so many wars that “keep taking years off my life”. He’s about to re-enter the ring with a man with whom he shared the biggest war of his career. “I don’t listen to myself,” he conceded.
To be both Wardley the fighter and Wardley the father, he has to separate the two. “There’s a Jekyll and Hyde going on, they’re two different people,” he explained. “I love my child dearly with every bit of my heart, but I guess in the nicest way, she is no consideration to me whatsoever when I'm in the middle of the ring, because she can't be. That can’t be a factor in my brain, otherwise I'm not gonna achieve big things.”
Moving on from the setback of five months ago required Wardley to do something he’d never done before: watch back a fight he’d lost. To start, he was doing this alone in the dead of night, waiting for his partner and baby to go to sleep before poring over the footage: “I knew my missus doesn’t really enjoy it.” He has since learned where he needed to adjust, and while he obviously wasn’t going to share that information before fight night, he believes his malleability will shine through in their rematch.
“I think we can all be very plain and honest here that the room for growth between the pair of us is exponentially in my favour,” Wardley proclaimed. “That's not to take away from Daniel at all. He's a good fighter. He does things very well, and he has done for a number of years.
“But the room for change and growth and adjustment in style [is something] which I've proven across different fights against different fighters. I've not looked the same in all my fights. I've been able to adjust and change things around. That's already ticked off and proven in my books. I just need to apply it again to this fight.”
Wardley has continued to repeat the same summation of his first fight in the build-up to the second: “I was a victim of my own success.” He lacked the composure necessary when Dubois was there for the taking. But as he heads into fight week, Wardley is at ease; that night in Manchester confirmed to him that he has the fundamentals of beating Dubois already down.
He can hit him hard enough. “I’ve ticked that box, I can knock you down - and not just the once, the twice. It doesn’t prove it’s a fluke; it’s a consistent action, it’s something I can do,” Wardley said. But he can also get hit. Asked about Dubois’s haymakers, he denied being particularly taken aback: “I’m not gonna disrespect the man by saying he’s not a big puncher or that I didn’t feel it. I did - I just wasn’t... that bothered by it.”
Wardley is confident he will this time find a way to get through Dubois in the cauldron of the O2 Arena. Redemption has been on his mind from the moment he was beaten. But it’s not just personal revenge that has motivated his quick turnaround. There is a changing of the guard at heavyweight; Wardley refuses to become a side character of the new generation.
“We've seen how quickly the division can be turned on its head. [Oleksandr] Usyk vacating the belts threw the division upside down, and all of a sudden there was all these fights being made and all these things going on. If I'm just sat at the wayside, I can be left, lost in the dark,” he said.
In his quest to fill an Usyk-shaped hole at the very top, diving straight back into this rematch comes with a huge risk. Back-to-back defeats could send Wardley plummeting out of the world title picture. On the difficulty of building Wardley back up in the event of another loss, Warren said, “It depends how he loses,” before the Queensberry chief - who also promotes Dubois - quickly hinted there will only be one outcome: “It ain’t gonna go the distance. Not these two.”
This will not just be a slugfest spectacle; there are career-altering stakes at play. Dubois succeeded when tasked with bouncing back from failure before, doing so against Wardley. No longer surrounded by the mystique of being undefeated, Wardley now gets his turn to prove he belongs.