James ‘Jazza’ Dickens is determined to make the most of an unexpected opportunity when he fights Zelfa Barrett in Manchester this weekend.

The junior lightweight fight takes place at Manchester’s Co-Op Live Arena on Saturday and will be broadcast live worldwide by DAZN. Jack Catterall’s interim WBO junior welterweight title fight with Arnold Barboza will headline the show.

The 33 year-old Liverpudlian has been looking for a way back into the big time since losing an IBF featherweight title bid to Kid Galahad in 2021.

Dickens, 34-5 (14 KOs), has been a popular stalwart of the British scene for years. He has held the British super bantamweight and IBO 126lb titles and defeated future WBA featherweight champion, Leigh Wood, and Ryan Walsh on his way to winning the Golden Contract tournament in 2020.

The defeat to Galahad was a painful night both physically and emotionally but the way he was cast to one side afterwards was probably just as difficult to deal with.

Dickens lives for boxing and ground away, desperately tying to keep himself relevant and make sure his name remained in the picture. In October 2022 he won the IBO belt by outpointing the decent Lerato Diamini but lost it when he struggled desperately to make the featherweight limit before his defence against Hector Sosa and was stopped in the tenth round.

He moved upto junior lightweight last year and scored two routine knockouts.

This weekend’s fight with Barrett, 31-2 (17 KOs), certainly isn’t easy but it does offer him a belated, unexpected route back to world title contention.

Dickens had a few offers on the table as the New Year began but decided to take the most high risk, high reward one.

“It was the opportunity. It wasn't anything personal. It wasn't aimed at anyone. It was just purely the opportunity. A Matchroom show and what comes after that,” he told The Ring.

“I took this one. It’s probably a bigger test than the other options, in my opinion, but it wasn't a big platform like this is.

“I think he [Barrett] is a good fighter. It's one of them where he weren’t on my radar, and I weren’t on his and it was just all of a sudden, ‘Do you want that fight?'

“What can it do for me and what can it do for him? It's just pretty similar, really.

“I've not so much aimed towards him, this one. It's just all about my career. What do I need to do myself to get to that next step.”

Making it to the scales healthy and injury free isn’t - and shouldn’t - be easy but it should never become desperate.

Dickens now has four pounds less to lose. He wont spend the night before the weight in sitting on the sofa watching television and eating snacks but there will have been many times when he has made the long, daunting trip to cut his final few pounds feeling like his body doesn’t have anything left to give.

Dickens still has to work incredibly hard to make 130lbs but the weight just makes the final couple of days that little bit easier.

“I feel fantastic,” he said.

“It's not like now it's easy. It's more like it’s just not as hard. It's not about who does the most, it’s about who takes the least out of himself.

“It is just the way life goes. Sometimes you're bottlenecked into a weight class. You’re getting close to the world title and you're in the top 10 of the rankings. You're not going to let that go for nothing.

“You need a massive team, a marketing team, a promoter behind you for you to be able to jump up all of a sudden but you get bottlenecked and you've got to carry on.

“You've got to face that. You've got to go down that road sometimes.”