{"id":24659,"date":"2026-01-16T13:50:46","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T13:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/fabio-wardley-seeks-spring-date-for-first-wbo-world-title-defence\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T13:50:47","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T13:50:47","slug":"fabio-wardley-seeks-spring-date-for-first-wbo-world-title-defence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/fabio-wardley-seeks-spring-date-for-first-wbo-world-title-defence\/","title":{"rendered":"Fabio Wardley seeks spring date for first WBO world title defence"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Wardley would still love an opportunity to take on Usyk, who still holds the WBA, WBC and IBF heavyweight belts, but accepts it is a case of having to bide his time.<\/p>\n

“That’s up to the man himself. A fight between us could be as far away or as close as he wants it to be. It could be next or never,” he said.<\/p>\n

“He holds the keys in the division, he’s earned that right to dictate things.”<\/p>\n

Another opponent Wardley would love to face is former world champion Tyson Fury, who announced the end of his most recent ‘retirement’ two weeks ago.<\/a><\/p>\n

“He wants a little warm-up fight and then to try and grab a world title around the summer time,” said 31-year-old Wardley.<\/p>\n

“We were trying to poke and prod him into a fight but I don’t think he wants to jump that deep into the water after a year out of the ring. He’s going to dip his toe back in and maybe we can catch him in the summer.”<\/p>\n

Wardley believes Usyk might be reluctant to take on Fury again in the short term, having beaten him twice already, so Wardley represents the latter’s best opportunity of a world title shot.<\/p>\n

“There’s only two options for that – me and Usyk. As a plan he might try to snatch mine off me and then try and get hold of the Usyk fight again,” he added.<\/p>\n

Listen to Graeme McLoughlin’s full BBC Radio Suffolk interview with Fabio Wardley from 18:45 GMT on Friday.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Wardley would still love an opportunity to take on Usyk, who still holds the WBA, WBC and IBF heavyweight belts, but accepts it is a case of having to bide his time. “That’s up to the man himself. A fight between us could be as far away or as close as he wants it to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-boxing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24661,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24659\/revisions\/24661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}