By Sean McDaniel: David Haye couldn’t have picked a worse time to come up lame with a back injury with his scheduled June 20th bout with IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko only three weeks away. The injury and the subsequent pull out from the fight by Haye has left Wladimir scrambling around looking for another opponent.

Luckily for Klitschko, he’s had no shortage of qualified heavyweights that have stepped forward ranging from Odlanier Solis, James Toney, Kevin Johnson, John Ruiz and Ruslan Chagaev. Perhaps because Chagaev is a title holder, the WBA champion in recess, Wladimir has been looking at trying to arrange a fight with Chagaev.

Even better for Wladimir is that Chagaev is a German-based heavyweight, which is where the fight will be taking place on June 20th, thus making it more likely that more Germans tune in to see the fight.

Most of the tickets for the 60,000 Veltins Arena have been purchased by Germans, with only 5000 being bout by British fans. This makes it even more important that Wladimir choose a fighter like Chagaev to fight him on that date. Nikolay Valuev was another heavyweight that Wladimir wanted to fight.

However, Valuev hasn’t shown any interest in taking the fight according to reports. I can’t blame Valuev, because with his slow hand speed, lack of power and foot speed, he’d be destroyed by a heavyweight like Klitschko.

Haye, 28, is understandably disappointed by the injury and is asking Wladimir for a three week postponement of the bout with July 11th being the date that Haye feels that he’ll be ready to meet Wladimir in the ring. A fight against Haye would be the more popular fight than a bout against Chagaev there’s no question about it.

But there might be a risk in trying to fight Haye if the injury fails to heal properly and Haye has to pull out again. Additionally, if Haye goes ahead and fights anyway with his injured back he’d have an excuse to use for losing the fight, saying that his back wasn’t right and that he hadn’t been able to train as good as he’d like for the bout.

Indeed, if the injury is to heal correctly Haye would likely have to take it easy for awhile and lay off hard training you would think. Haye wouldn’t be doing himself any justice if he were to try and fight Wladimir on July 11th and then get knocked out in the 1st or 2nd rounds.

According to Bernd Bonte, Wladimir Klitschko’s manager, Chagaev is the only fighter that he is considering to fight with at this time. Haye appears to have been put on the shelf for a fight later on in the future, which is kind of sad for David considering all the fabulous promotional activities that he’s done in making the Haye-Klitschko fight sell tickets and get fan attention.

Haye has almost singlehandedly built up the fight and now because of his injury he won’t be able to get to the starting line.

It’s doubtful that a fight between Chagaev and Klitschko would ever get close to selling 60,000 tickets like the Haye-Klitschko fight has done, so Haye has really done Wladimir a big favor in selling out the arena. Now, it looks as if Chagaev will be able to take advantage by fighting in front of the largest crowd in his pro career.