Fabio Wardley and Frazer Clarke on first fight epic: ‘There’s no drama like heavyweight boxing’

Heavyweight boxing, quite literally, hits different.

Their punches exert such force, they have to take such punishment that the spectacle at its best, and its most savage, is stunning. There is no better example than the titanic battle Fabio Wardley and Frazer Clarke endured in their first championship clash.

Probably the greatest British heavyweight title fight ever, their split draw in March was as sensational to watch as it was horrendous – you would imagine – to experience.

“There’s no drama like heavyweight boxing,” Clarke chuckled with some understatement.

Neither man, though, hesitated when it came to doing it all over again.

They will rematch this Saturday, live on Sky Sports Box Office, on the same Riyadh Season event as the Artur Beterbiev-Dmitry Bivol undisputed light-heavyweight title fight.

Wardley embraces going back to the dark place that was his first fight with Clarke.

“I’m quite an egotistical person so I wouldn’t have liked to have left that fight unfinished,” Wardley, the British and Commonwealth champion, told Sky Sports.

“If you look at my career, you look at my resume, I only want the big fights. I only want the big occasions. I want to be in those big moments. Maybe not as gory and as damaging as the last one was.

“But again, sensational occasion, the atmosphere, the buzz, the animosity all the way through and the build of it and the anticipation. Everyone was so excited about it, that’s what I revel in.

“I love that. That’s what I want to be in.”

Clarke is just as eager to go there again with him. He points out that he is no “big, friendly giant”.

“That’s what a lot of people think I am,” he told Sky Sports. “People sometimes struggle to see that I’m a fighter, because I’m quite a bubbly guy.

“I grew up watching those type of fights. Go to YouTube, I’m straight to Gatti-Ward, I’m straight to Morales-Barrera, I’m straight to wars.

“Growing up, that’s what I loved watching. Then you think to yourself I’d love to be in one of them. Being in one is one too many now.

“You don’t want to do it again. But if you have to go there, it’s not a problem for me. Digging deep and being tough is not something I try to do. It’s just engrained in me. It’s in my blood.

“I’m always going to fight until I’ve got no fight left in me. I don’t know anything else. I know no different, It’s the way I’ve been brought up since I was a little kid. If we have to go there, we’ll go there.”

It was a bruising, punishing collision that took them to the well, and beyond. They both hurt each other, but it was Wardley who dropped Clarke in the fifth round.

That confirmed Wardley’s punch-power, and also Clarke’s powers of recovery.

“He did prove [his grit],” Wardley acknowledged. “He got knocked down, he got up, he got buzzed countless times over. Was smart enough, cheeky a few times, spit his gumshield out. Old wily tricks.

“I gave a lot of credit to him post-fight. I think it’s hard not to when you share 12 rounds with someone like that, not to come out with a form of admiration.”

But he added: “I wouldn’t say I let him off the hook. I just made mistakes that allowed him to recover, get away from it and regroup and start again.

“It’s funny, it almost didn’t help that I knocked him down. Because I thought here we go, let’s get stuck in, let’s hunt him down, let’s chase him.

“Although he got knocked down at two minutes and 58 seconds of the round, he obviously got the full recovery time. In the sixth I just tried to steamroll in and try and get rid of him.

“It used up a lot of my own energy. I need to be more economical.”

There was a lesson there for Clarke, one reinforced by Daniel Dubois’ blasting one-punch finish of Anthony Joshua in their IBF heavyweight world title fight little more than a fortnight ago.

It is something he has taken to heart. “There’s no room for complacency,” Clarke said.

“There’s no room for having one second off in this sport. In my division in one second it can be over.

“So you’ve got to be on it all the time.”

Wardley sustained damage, notably with a significant cut that stretched across the bridge of his nose.

Clarke said: “I think I’ll hit him [there] at least once and I think it’ll open. When it does, I’m experienced, I’m not going to rush in like a madman. But if I make a mess of that, who knows?”

The champion, though, managed to cope with the blood and all the pain of the first fight.

Wardley recalled: “The only moments you really notice it, the ref will call a break and you’ll have a little five seconds to yourself to think. I looked around and thought: ‘Cor, this is a bit messy’.

“The canvas, my face and nose. I rubbed my nose and my gloves were covered. I had white gloves on. By the end of it, they were red.”

It never deterred him. “In the mist of all the firefight, there’s not a lot you’re really taking in. In little moments there’s little bits where you go [to yourself] this one’s a bit of a battle,” Wardley reflected.

“When you’re in it, you don’t view it the same. It’s just round, rest, you get up, walk to the middle and you go again. You’re not in the middle thinking this is heavy, this is hard, this is tiring.

“You’re just thinking ‘right I need to do this, I need to do that’. You’ve got the game plan going constantly through your head.”

All they will think about is how to win. “One thing I got from [Lennox Lewis] was he believed in himself. He didn’t believe he was going to win. He believed he was going to knock the person in front of him out. That’s Holyfield, that’s everyone else,” Clarke said.

“If you believe in yourself and you believe in what you’ve done for years, [you will]. I think I’ve got the tools and the heart to do it.”

For their skills, for their plans, their knowledge of each other, their understanding of how to fight this battle, it still might all come down to a different question – one of sheer, pure determination.

‘A battle of wills’

Sky Sports commentator Andy Clarke said: “We saw at the start of the fight how effective Frazer Clarke was with his jab and he neglected that as the fight went on. Because he got tired and it’s harder to keep your shape.

“If you can keep that discipline and shape as deep into the fight as you can, I think that’s a key for him because he’s got the more basic better boxing tools.

“Easier said than done, because technique tends to suffer when exhaustion sets in, but if he’s trained with that in mind and taken that conditioning to another level, I think that’s how he can win the fight.

“Fabio Wardley, what we know about him and what he proved to himself is that he can look like he’s about to unravel but he’s still capable of slinging in heavy shots from seemingly any angle.

“Again, if he can just tighten up a bit then that’s really what you would be looking to work on.

“Rematches are often not very similar to the first one. If they are similar then it’s either because neither fighter has made the adjustments or both have. Sometimes you get fighters who are what they are and aren’t really capable of changing and therefore they just go at it again in exactly the same way. I don’t think that’s really true of these two.

“I feel like Frazer will know what he needs to do but Fabio’s still a work in progress as well, with his much-documented lack of an amateur background and he’s an intelligent guy. He will feel like he can make those changes.

“I’d be surprised if they both don’t manage to bring something a bit different to the first one but I do kind of expect it to go back to where it was in the first fight, where it will come down to, in large part, a battle of wills.”

Fabio Wardley’s huge rematch with Frazer Clarke is on the epic Artur Beterbiev vs Dmitry Bivol bill on Saturday October 12 live on Sky Sports Box Office. Book Wardley v Clarke 2 and Beterbiev v Bivol now!