Fabio Wardley Defends Coach Ben Davison After Itauma's Defeat

Fabio Wardley has stepped into the line of fire to defend coach Ben Davison, as criticism rains down on the trainer in the wake of Moses Itauma’s painful defeat to Filip Hrgovic at London’s O2 Arena.

Itauma, 21, had chased history on Saturday night, bidding to become the second-youngest world heavyweight champion. For eight rounds he looked every bit the heir to the throne – bullying Hrgovic, piling on pressure, and banking round after round. Then the tank emptied.

By the ninth, the young southpaw’s legs betrayed him. The snap went from his punches, his shoulders sagged, and the Croatian veteran sensed it. Before Hrgovic could close the show himself, Itauma’s corner intervened, throwing in the towel as their fighter laboured under the assault.

The ending lit a fuse. Itauma had admitted beforehand he had never gone 12 rounds in sparring. When the stoppage came, that detail turned into ammunition. Fingers pointed quickly at the gym and at Davison, with critics accusing the camp of mismanaging a prodigy on the brink of a world title.

Wardley has heard enough.

The Ipswich heavyweight, who also works under Davison, knows the feeling of watching a fight slip away late. He dominated large spells of his first meeting with Daniel Dubois before running out of steam and being stopped in the 11th. Now, with a WBO title rematch against “Dynamite” set for 17 October, Wardley is treating the backlash against his trainer as personal.

“I do feel like it’s my turn,” he said, having already backed Itauma to come again and eventually claim a world title of his own.

“It’s my turn to do my bit for the gym. It's my turn to prove because I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of criticism he's [Davison] received and just almost in shock of just like, I don't know another trainer in British boxing that gets so much stick after a loss.

“I find it bemusing, like it's delusional to me. If anything, that's added a bit of fuel to me to be like, ‘Alright, fine, no worries – I'll show you what us, the team, Ben Davison, what we can all do. I'll prove it to you. I'll take that on my shoulders. I'll wear that, no problem’.”

Wardley’s own defeat to Dubois has also been dragged into the debate. Unlike Itauma, he was allowed to fight on after absorbing heavy punishment, the referee finally waving it off in the 11th rather than his corner pulling him out. For some, that contrast has become part of the scrutiny on Davison and his approach in the corner.

Wardley rejects the idea outright.

He insists his team judged the Dubois fight exactly right and that the people around him are anything but novices learning on the job.

“I'll repeat over and over again, the people in my corner aren't new,” he said. “Like Daniel and Don [Charles, Dubois’s trainer], for example. I'm not flicking from coach to coach to coach to coach to people who don’t know me. One, I’ve had Robert Hodgins, who’s been my coach since I started. And I mean that from since I first ever put on a pair of gloves. I trust that man with my life.

“Same with Ben Davison. He's been with me for five, six, maybe coming up to seven years. I trust that man as well. So, these aren’t new people.

“These aren’t fresh people that are inexperienced or don’t know me. They’ve seen me at hard spas. They’ve seen me through hard fights and hard moments and hard occasions. They know my durability and what I can go through and how I can come out on the other side.”

If Wardley is circling the wagons, Frank Warren is choosing a more measured line.

The Queensberry promoter moved to defend Davison’s broader reputation, pointing out that a coach who regularly features in high-profile, high-stakes fights naturally attracts more heat when things go wrong. At the same time, Warren made it clear that Itauma’s collapse after such a commanding lead cannot pass without internal review.

“Regarding Ben, we will have a chat,” Warren said. “There’s certain things that I’ve seen in the fight and seen on the night that obviously have got to be dealt with.

“You have to manage a fight. All he’d done, he got in the ring, he just went and put his foot down on the accelerator and pushed it in overdrive and never took it off.

“He never went out; he never sort of went back to the jab, moved around, just took it easy, calmed down. If he’d have just boxed – what was he, eight rounds up on all the cards? All he had to do was box.”

That, ultimately, is the crux of the storm around Davison: was this a young fighter overcome by the occasion and his own ambition, or a corner that failed to rein him in when the job was almost done?

Wardley has already made his choice. He plans to answer the question in the most brutal way boxing allows – under the lights, with Dubois in front of him and a world title on the line, carrying not just his own ambitions, but the reputation of a gym that suddenly feels under siege.