Fabio Wardley (9-0) with 8 ko´s is being built up the good way against a lot of soft opposition and the idea has been to build up his record while at the same time making sure that he improves from fight to fight. Reports say that he has had all his boxing experience in the pro ranks with zero amateur fights. What we can tell from looking at footage of him is that he is very powerful. That is easy to notice and he seems to be punching hard with both hands. However, what also is obvious is his lack of technique. This is very common for fighters who enter the sport late in their teens or in the adult life such as Wardley. The biggest problems usually that they encounter is not how to throw their own punches but how to build up a proper defense. The reflexes and the ability to foresee where the punches are coming from is built up by a lot of repetition. It looks like Wardley´s defense is lacking but that is not to say that the opponent Richard Lartey is a person who can take advantage of that. We have seen Richard Lartey in two notable fights. The first one was against Daniel Dubois. We knew basically nothing about him prior to that. What we learned from that fight was that he can take a big punch and it took a monstrous puncher like Daniel Dubois several hard blows before he could put him down. Usually if Dubois lands one good blow the fight is over with but Lartey took a good few of them. We also learned that he is strong physically and has a good right hand and perhaps most importantly, he is not afraid to punch at the same time as his opponent. He will try as hard as he can to land his right hand bomb even if he is badly hurt. Then we saw him in against Gorman and that was a different fight all together. Gorman is very good technically but he is average in the power department. Gorman outclassed Lartey in the fight and was very superior but he wasn´t able to stop him. So in that fight Lartey proved that he can take many punches in a fight as long as the other guy isn´t the biggest puncher. Nathan Gorman is leagues better than Fabio Wardley technically but Wardley is the bigger puncher of the two by far. Wardley like we said have the kind of power that if he lands clean on Lartey, he will probably take him out. It is not unthinkable that Wardley himself gets caught with a big shot from Lartey and gets hurt. We don’t know how Wardley will react because we have never seen him get hurt like that before due to the opposition he has faced. (sign in to view our prediction & pick)
Lartey has proved that he can take a punch and he recently went the distance with Gorman so he will be in fighting shape. We see this fight going past the 4.5 Rounds mark for a price of -110 (1.90 decimal odds)