Haye-Harrison: Can David take Audley’s best left hand?

By Boxing News - 10/24/2010 - Comments

Image: Haye-Harrison: Can David take Audley's best left hand?By William Mackay: Despite having captured the WBA heavyweight title with a narrow and somewhat controversial 12 round decision over Nikolay Valuev a year ago, World Boxing Association heavyweight champion David Haye (24-1, 22 KO’s) remains largely unproven at heavyweight as he approaches his November 13th fight against the big punching Audley Harrison (27-4, 20 KO’s) at the M.E.N. Arena, Manchester, Lancashire. Haye, 30, hasn’t been in with the kind of puncher that he’ll be facing in Harrison and it’s going to be very interesting to see how Haye deals with getting nailed with the 38-year-old Harrison’s best left hand.

Will Haye be able to take it or will he be sent crashing to the canvas after the first big left hand he receives from Harrison. Haye is promising a brutal, humiliating knockout win. However, Harrison is saying that he can take Haye’s best shots without going down but he believes Haye won’t be able to take his best left hand and remain standing. What we do know is that Haye was put down on the canvas by Monte Barrett and Jean Marc Mormeck in the past three years and none of those guys are huge punchers. Haye’s opposition has been pretty limited during his career, with the best fighters he’s fought being Carl Thompson, Barrett, Valuev, and Mormeck.

You have to dismiss Haye’s win over John Ruiz because it came at the very end of Ruiz’s career when he was 38, and you also have to look past Haye’s win over Enzo Maccarinelli in 2008, because Enzo has been proven to have a glass jaw since then. Haye’s opposition has been deeply limited and his experience against power punchers pretty much limited to Thompson. Harrison is clearly a bigger puncher than any of those guys. Harrison may have problems with letting his hands go, but he is a huge puncher when he’s throwing his left hand with authority. So, the question is can Haye take Harrison’s best left hand? I don’t know that he can.

I think Haye’s chin is much too fragile to hold up under Harrison’s best shots for long. This fight could boil down to being a situation where the first person to land a big bomb will be the winner in the fight. I would say it’s going to be Haye, but he’s giving away almost an entire foot in reach to Harrison and close to 40 pounds in weight. That’s pretty significant if you ask me. It means that Harrison stands a very good chance of being the first to land in this fight, and if a guy with the kind of power that Harrison has lands a big shot on Haye’s glass jaw, we could be seeing a new WBA heavyweight champion on November 13th.



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