There is not another sport in the world that can deliver a sliding doors moment quite like boxing.

At one point, Fabio Wardley was on his way to the back of the long heavyweight queue after fluffing his lines on the biggest night of his life.

Within a split second, Justis Huni was vanquished as the home favourite served up the perfect climax imaginable with one well-timed extension of his right arm beneath the rain at Portman Road.

The marking around his face had barely had time to develop by the time he faced the press in the bowels of the stadium that just played host to a moment Wardley might never top. But there was no real sense of celebration from the victor as the post-mortem began.

His promoter Frank Warren beamed alongside him at the top table. He and his Queensberry Promotions team had decided to call this show ‘Running Towards Adversity’ which is the same mantra that lined Ipswich Town’s home and away kits this season. “Running towards adversity?” Fabio said from behind dark glasses as he took his seat. “More like running towards punches.”

It was a typical moment of self deprecation from a man who has no problem discussing his own shortcomings. So, it was very telling that he was adamant in his assessment that he is now ready for a shot at the world title despite being outboxed by Huni for the majority of Saturday night’s main event.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Wardley said. “The calibre of someone like Oleksandr Usyk is extremely high but we’ve seen how quickly and how much I can learn from a performance. The first Frazer Clarke fight leading into the second one showed how I made the adjustments and changed things around.

“I am very much a student of the game and a student of the performances I’ve put out. Me and the team will sit down and analyse them, look where we went wrong, the things we did right and look at how we can bring them into the next fight regardless of who it’s against.

“But I don’t believe I need any more fights. I feel I am very much ready for the top level because against those top guys I have fight changing and fight ending ability that’s always in my pocket. A man like Deontay Wilder did pretty well from having that in the bag all the way through. I think I have that mixed with some skill and ability in there as well. I’m always learning. I have everything it takes to win at this top level.”

Wardley, at the time of writing, is The Ring’s No. 10 rated heavyweight but his victory over the previously undefeated Huni secured the WBA interim title which will put him, eventually, in line for a shot at the world title. That belt is currently held by Ring No. 1 Usyk, who will put it - along with the WBO and WBC belts - on the line in his July 19 undisputed fight with IBF king Daniel Dubois at Wembley Stadium.

That fight would have made for incredibly hard viewing for Wardley had Huni managed to box his way safely to victory at Portman Road. Now he can look forward to facing one of them - or maybe boxing for a vacant belt - at some point in 2026.

The rest of the year will likely be taken up by his initial foray into fatherhood as his partner is currently heavily pregnant with their first daughter. She sat ringside alongside Wardley’s mother for the fight but the dad-to-be confirmed that even the stress levels of watching him pull victory from the jaws of defeat had not brought on an early labour.

“She came back to the changing room just to let everyone know she hasn’t had the baby,” he said. “Don’t worry. She hasn’t gone into labour.”

At one point Wardley admitted he could feel the fight slipping away. But, as Ben Davison delivered instructions in the corner, the 30-year-old sat down on his stool, looked around the stadium filled with those members of his family and thousands of fans and pulled himself together. Huni appeared to be turning the screw and beating the fight out of Wardley but he refused to lose hope.

“I had a quiet word to myself on the stool, really,” Wardley said. “I had a quiet moment to myself where I just paid attention to where I am, where I’ve got to. I haven’t got here by being annoyed at myself or feeling sorry for myself. I had to shake that off, get things moving and get back to the gameplan. That’s very much what I did.

“I’m not the finished article. I haven’t got everything nailed down or everything perfect, everything all ticked off. I’m still very much learning on the job which is a funny thing to say when I’m 20 fights in and interim world champion but I am.

“Justis had more amateur fights than I’ve had fights in my whole life. He has been boxing since he was eight years old and I’ve been boxing for about eight or nine years. We saw how much I took from the first Frazer fight and how I took that into the second one and that’s what I’ll do with this one.

“On the night, sometimes the puzzle pieces don’t figure out together perfectly and you have to smash them together a bit and make up some sort of crayon-macaroni art. I knew I had it in the bag, I knew I always had that there.”

And while the jubilant, soaking hordes who trudged back into the Ipswich night might retell the tale of Wardley’s ‘punch from the Gods’ for years to come, the man who delivered it insisted there was nothing lucky about it.

“I saw a couple of clips and it looks like a wondrous punch that I pulled out of nowhere,” he said. “It may sound a bit silly but we did very much drill that particular punch over and over again, I just wasn’t letting it go. Through a lot of the fight Frank [Warren] was screaming at me to let the right hand go but I just wasn’t.

“I was being too coy, too cute and thinking about things too much instead of letting my natural instincts figure it out.”

What is undeniable is that those natural instincts have made Wardley so far impossible to beat in a fight. Across four white collar nights and now 20 professional outings, Wardley has never returned to a quiet, losing dressing room. However, in two of his last three fights now, he has had to endure the sort of physical punishment that can take a toll on any man. The first Clarke fight in March 2024 was a scarcely-believable war while Huni was able to turn parts of this encounter into a one-sided beating.

Nobody has ever managed to stay on their feet throughout a fight with Wardley, now 19-0-1, 18 KOs, but as he moves ever closer to the elite of the division, more hard nights could be on the horizon.

But when asked how many more times he wants to go to the well in this fashion, Wardley smiled. “That’s it. I think I’ve had my fill.

“A couple more like the last one [the rematch with Clarke] a first round knockout, I’ll take those every day. But, look, the game is the game. There are going to be moments where I’ll have to graft it out and grind it out like that.

“But I do not want to keep taking years off my life with fights like this. Maybe I have a screw loose but I do absolutely love it. The occasion, the moment, the buzz, the build; there is nothing better. It’s intoxicating but maybe I’ll keep my hands up a little bit more.”