By Chris Williams: In going through many of David Haye’s top fights, I couldn’t help but notice that Haye relies about completely on his right hand to do most of his damage to his opponents. Haye rarely throws any jabs with his left hand and mostly lets it dangles down by his side, as if it’s a useless appendage serving no purpose. In contrast, Wladimir Klitschko, his opponent for June 20th in Germany, has knockout power in each hand and is perfectly balanced in his ability to use both hands to inflict damage.
With Haye, he’s like a basketball player that can’t move to his left or dribble with his left hand. Haye will throw a lunging left hook from time to time, but he can’t really get a lot of power on the punch unfortunately.
His left hook is like a weak right hand and he tends to use it go get his opponents off balance so that he can land his big right hand. Much of the time, Haye will attempt to throw long lead right hands without a jab or a left hook in front of it. He’s been able to get away with doing this because of the limited competition that he fought as a cruiserweight.
However, at the heavyweight level, Haye is likely to pay a price for telegraphing his punches like this. Against Monte Barrett, Haye was hit quite easily by the small American fighter and Haye wasn’t able to do much with any punch other than his right hand to do damage to Barrett.
I’m wondering how Haye will be able to land his right hand if he doesn’t have a set up punch to use on Wladimir. At 6’3”, Haye is much too short to land his right hand unless he can get close enough to Wladimir to land it. For that to happen, it will require Haye to be able to use his left hand to get in position.
He isn’t going to be able to come lunging in with a big hand and hope to land it because Wladimir will be a long ways away and would pick him off with short left hooks and straight right hands if Haye makes that mistake.
This is going to be a problem for Haye, because he doesn’t have the best of chins and is likely to get hit harder than he’s ever been hit before when he does try to land a shot. Haye looked slow against Barrett and the extra weight that Haye put on seems to have not helped his speed in any way.
That’s why it’s crucial that Haye develop his nearly useless left hand. It wouldn’t be easy even if he does try to land with it because Haye doesn’t have a jab. Most of his left hooks are thrown in a shorter distance meant for fighters that crowd him.
Against Wladimir, Haye won’t be able to leap far enough to land his weak left hooks and will get eaten alive in midair if he’s foolish enough to try and throw one of those amateurish punches.
At the end of the day, I see Wladimir as being a more complete fighter and he’ll be able to use his two-fisted power to dominate Haye and his only real weapon – his right hand. It’s a credit to Haye that he’s gotten this far in his career only having a right hand, but it also is telling of the lack of quality fighters in the cruiserweight division that he was able to win a couple of titles.
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