He had just completed 12 hard rounds with Sam Gilley, the Spurs fan from down the road, and the pair faced an anxious wait to see who would claim the British and Commonwealth junior middleweight titles.

Given he had dropped a majority decision to Josh Kelly at Wembley and a split to Caoimhin Agyarko at Windsor Park, Belfast, the 30-year-old Davis had previous experience with painful decisions at stadiums.

This time, however, things would be different as all three judges returned narrow scorecards in his favor. Finally, he was the champion, and for only the second time in his career he was a decision winner in a 12-round fight.

“I was waiting to get robbed,” Davis tells The Ring with a smile. “In my head I’m thinking it’s going to happen again, and I’m just waiting for this to go Sam Gilley’s way. So when I got the decision I just couldn’t hold in the tears, man.

"With everything I’ve been through, not just boxing but around boxing and with my upbringing and all that ... to finally get to a stage that matters and win – it was a good feeling. “Honestly I wasn’t expecting to break down like that, but when I heard those words, it meant so much to me.” The victory was the final outing in a busy run of five fights in just 13 months. However, given he had lost three of his previous four, all of which were high-level 12 rounders, the pressure was palpable as he arrived in north London.

“Every day I kept saying to myself that I simply cannot lose this fight,” he says. “The camp was harder because of that pressure.

I knew that if I didn’t win this fight, it would be a case of, ‘Where do I go from here?’ So to get the decision like I did, it hits different.”

In the build up to the fight, Davis (15-3, 6 KOs) had described the fight as "the end of the beginning"; a fight that would usher in the next stage of his career with his apprenticeship well and truly served. He also insisted that he would have a breather once he became champion after so many fights in a short space of time.

However, he had barely left the stadium when his manager, Sunny Edwards, the former IBF world flyweight champion, offered him the chance to box only a few months later.

“It was straight after the fight and Sunny says about this possible first defense in February,” Davis says. "I said, 'Sunny I need a break, man. ' But then I think I had about three days, got bored and thought, ‘Let me ring Sunny.’ I told him to take the fight because I can’t do this break thing. It’s like being in the army. When you’re used to a certain way of life, it’s hard to go back to normal. “I thought I’ll just get back in the gym, do the hard work now and put my feet up later.”

So just 15 days after winning at Tottenham, it was officially announced that Davis would make the first defense of his titles against English champion Bilal Fawaz on the undercard of Leigh Wood’s clash with Josh Warrington, which takes place this Saturday at Nottingham Arena live on DAZN.

The 37-year-old Fawaz (10-1-1, 3KOs) is best known for having one of the most remarkable stories in British boxing. Born in Nigeria, Fawaz was trafficked to England aged 14 and has battled to have his citizenship assured almost ever since.

He spent time in a detention center during 2017, but as a stateless refugee he could not be lawfully deported. And in 2022 he was finally granted a work permit and turned professional after a successful amateur career.  It is the sort of storyline befitting a Hollywood film, and winning the British title would represent an appropriate ending given his regular battles with the authorities in this country.

But one man out to spoil such an ending is Davis, who has a story of his own given he fought back from two prison sentences to reach his position as British and Commonwealth champion.

“Look, I don’t know the man,” Davis says of Fawaz. “This is just boxing. “There's nothing against the man. His backstory, I'm happy for him to get to a place where he is now, but right now it's me or him. So that hunger he's got in him, I've already been at that hunger. 

“A lot of people have had hard backstories, so it's nothing new. You can have as hard a backstory as you want, this is about the skill. Boxing doesn’t care about that. It's about your skill and what you're going to do in the ring so that's what I'm focused on.”