Dubois and Wardley produced a fight that hinged on fine margins, with both men committing fully to the exchanges throughout. Knocked down twice — once in the opening round and again in the third — Dubois, aged 29, recovered to force a stoppage in the eleventh.

With their rematch on the horizon, Shane McGuigan — who previously worked as Dubois' trainer — has offered his assessment of the factors likely to decide the contest.

McGuigan attributes to Dubois a punching quality that is measured in tempo yet fully committed from the moment of initiation through to contact. With his guard raised, Dubois lets his hands fall before launching a right-hand swing. The density of his skeletal structure and the natural heft of his upper limbs combine to give each stroke a quality closer to pushing a weighted tool through resistance-free space.

Both Dubois and Zhang carry punching power that observers across the heavyweight division rate among the hardest found at that weight class. Technique in the legs can be developed through training, whereas raw hitting force is not something a coach can instil.

Footwork serves as Dubois's primary defensive tool, which may explain the relative absence of head movement from his fighting style. His footwork and body positioning give Dubois a capacity to generate attacks from multiple angles, drawing comparisons to the transitional speed Mike Tyson brought to the sport. For a boxer whose height reaches 6ft 4in, opponents carrying an extra four or five inches can cover the ground between neutral territory and punching distance in roughly a single purposeful step.

Dubois relies on the jab as a primary tool when facing an opponent. Among the various techniques a boxer can deploy, the jab stands as a foundational punch from which much of the sport's offensive and defensive play is built. Three paths open up once a jab gets thrown: absorb it, answer it with a counter, or slip the head away and fire one straight back. Fighters from earlier boxing generations would absorb an incoming jab while pressing their weight forward, channelling that combined motion to close the distance on their opponent.

In elite boxing, varying the distance at which the lead hand is thrown draws opponents into range, opening a lane for the rear hand to come through from the outside. A jab extends from Wardley, stalling briefly before the right hand follows through. He drives off the line without trading punches, opening up the angle for his right hand to land.

Within nine seconds, Wardley had floored Dubois — a fighter whose ring approach centres on landing early and committing to openings without delay. Dubois has shown a tendency to take time finding his rhythm once a contest gets under way. At the nine-second mark of his contest against Fabio Wardley, he was down on the canvas.

In bouts against Wardley and Lerena, he found himself floored in the opening stages and faced the task of working back from a deficit — though the Lerena contest showed what he could produce despite sustaining a near-complete tear of his ACL. His performance has tended to strengthen as bouts progress, though Oleksandr Usyk — widely regarded among analysts as one of the sport's most technically accomplished practitioners — proved an exception to that pattern. Flexibility in the face of changing circumstances has been a consistent feature of his approach.

In the period after his bout with Joe Joyce, Dubois reported ongoing concerns about his stamina and the toll physical exertion was taking on his body. Prior to bouts, the pre-fight warm-up and mobility work the team requires him to carry out in the dressing room has not always been followed through on his part. Early in a fight, counter-punches thrown off a pull-back movement have a habit of connecting.

When tiredness accumulates — a pattern that surfaced during the bout with Justis Huni — his defensive responses slow and opponents are able to land punches at the tail end of combinations once they have established his distance. Against Huni, round after round slipped away from him — a scorecard of something close to 8-2 would not have been unreasonable. In the matches leading up to later rounds, he wrapped up most contests before the final bell.

Against Hrgovic, the head movement accompanying his punches posed a clear problem. What sets him apart, analysts have noted, is the rotational drive originating at the hips, channelled through coordinated movement across the upper body. His quickness and physical strength are attributes that analysts note many opponents at the heavyweight level tend to lack.

Haye's punching force drew heavily on his quickness, meaning that as foot speed and hand speed faded toward the end of his boxing career, the raw hitting power behind his punches diminished alongside it.

The right hand sits at the core of Wardley's attacking approach — loaded through a pawing motion, then driven forward before he either pursues his opponent or drops back to read, adjust, and fire a counter. Among Wardley's less conventional weapons is a slip uppercut delivered from an unusual angle — a punch that carries physical demands alongside its tactical unpredictability.

Analysts have observed that Wardley can lose discipline at certain points in a bout, surrendering rounds unnecessarily — a pattern that tends to surface most noticeably through the middle portions of a contest. McGuigan expressed the view that Wardley might lean on his toughness and unconventional hitting power as a fallback rather than a primary weapon.

A nasal opening of this kind has the potential to present an ongoing challenge across the span of his career, according to some observers.