{"id":413376,"date":"2026-01-16T15:27:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-16T15:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/413376\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T15:27:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-16T15:27:13","slug":"fabio-wardley-seeks-spring-date-for-first-wbo-world-title-defence-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/413376\/","title":{"rendered":"Fabio Wardley seeks spring date for first WBO world title defence"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wardley would still love an opportunity to take on Usyk, who still holds the WBA, WBC and IBF…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":["post-413376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}