LONDON — Fabio Wardley used the rematch clause in his contract to force a second fight with Daniel Dubois, and it ended in the second round. Afterwards, IBF heavyweight champion Filip Hrgovic told reporters that Wardley should retire.
Dubois retained the WBO heavyweight title at the O2 Arena on Saturday, according to Sky Sports. A right cross put Wardley on one knee in the opening seconds. In the second round Dubois pinned him in a corner and hammered right hooks to his head until Wardley’s trainer, Ben Davison, threw in the towel and the referee rushed in to stop it.
The result was the reverse of May, when Dubois twice climbed off the canvas early on before stopping Wardley in the 11th round to take the title. “I had bad intentions from the beginning,” Dubois said this time, and of the first fight: “Our back was against the wall first time.”
Wardley was determined to win the title back as soon as he could, Sky Sports reported, and the rematch left more questions about him than about the champion.
Dubois said he saw “a lot of mental scars” on Wardley from the first fight and “just had to bring him back to that place”, Yahoo Sports reported. Wardley told DAZN as he left the ring that “preparation, for me, wasn’t ideal.”
Hrgovic was blunter. He said Wardley “didn’t look good”, and Yahoo Sports wrote that on the DAZN post-show he said he believed Wardley came back too soon after May.
The punch figures Yahoo Sports’ Alan Dawson cited show how one-sided it was: Wardley landed one punch in the first round and three in the second, four of 27, against 27 percent of 358 in May. Queensberry Promotions founder Frank Warren called Dubois’s night a “seek and destroy mission”, yet still described Wardley as “powerful”, “brave” and a “warrior”.
Wardley, Yahoo Sports wrote, is not contemplating retirement. He told DAZN that Dubois “is a testament to losing, coming back, and winning the world title for a second time”, and that he would “be looking to do the same thing.” Reacting to that, Dubois said: “Whether he does that, we’ll see.”
