By Sean McDaniel: The latest news on the big mega fight between IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and WBA heavyweight champion David Haye is that everything is taken care except for the venue and the fight date. Since those are seemingly smaller items compared to things like the purse split, it’s looking we’re going to be having a Klitschko-Haye fight in the first half of 2011 if everything goes right.

Wladimir, 6’6” 245 lbs., is going to have a huge size and reach advantage over the 6’2” 217 pound Haye. Even if Haye puts on some weight for this fight, he’s going to be much smaller than Wladimir and more in the Chris Byrd and Eddie Chambers size for this fight. If you look at Wladimir’s fights against those two small heavyweights, it was a huge mismatch because they were far too small to consistently land their shots.

Haye is likely going to have the same problem against Wladimir. He’s not going to have the reach need to land his punches all the time and is going to need to make the most of the few opportunities that he gets in the fight. To judges how Haye will do in this fight, you have to look back to when he fought WBA heavyweight champion Nikolay Valuev last year for the title.

In that fight, Haye mostly moved around the ring in huge circles to avoid Valuev’s shots, while every once in a while throwing a single looping shot of his own. Because Valuev didn’t have the hand speed, the power or the presence of mind to straighten out his punches, he was unable to take advantage of Haye’s looping shops by hitting him while he was in the process of throwing. Wladimir will likely be looking to throw straight punches to keep Haye from throwing his looping punches.

The question then is whether Haye’s hand speed will be good enough for him to still be able to land his long looping punches even though Wladimir will be waiting counter Haye with straight shots of his own. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.