By Ian Aldous: I get the feeling that very few people feel sorry for David Haye at the moment. I presume that I’m one of the few that does? For those that disagree with me, please, give me a chance to get my point across.

One of the things the British media tend to do is build up a sportsman and then proceed to rip them to pieces as soon as they go through any kind of setback. The latest victim of this is David Haye. I understand that some fans/writers thought that Haye, using his broken toe as an excuse for his defeat to Wladimir Klitschko, was embarrassing. That doesn’t mean we should hate the guy, he’s not the first person to use an excuse for a defeat and he surely will not be the last.

The one thing that really annoys me is that the media has gone all out for David. Frank Warren called David a ‘cry baby’ in the Sun newspaper while Jeff Powell ridiculed Haye in his column for the Daily Mail. I refuse to go back and read the article to get any quotes to post here. My apologies.

The fact is that David is a blown-up cruiserweight trying to stir some life into the most popular weight division in this great sport and I believe he captured the imagination of fans from all around the globe.

Just because he loses to a genuine heavyweight who uses his height and reach to execute the perfect game plan does not mean he’s a terrible fighter who should be ridiculed. I can’t remember the last time I saw Wladimir in a real fight in recent memory against guys who are genuine heavyweights consistently putting up less of a fight than we saw this past weekend.

We saw a world-class Wladimir Klitschko comfortably decision David and I don’t have a problem or an argument against that. I just can’t accept the way that the media will now treat Haye for the rest of his (probably short) career. He’s a former undisputed world cruiserweight champion. It’s not as though he came into this fight with several losses behind him and no world championships on his record. Give him a break!

Do people dislike Haye for the way that he hyped the fight? If we dislike any fighter who proclaims that he will KO his opponent and fails to do so, then that will leave us in a sad state of affairs. And pretty much every fighter in the world will have his own group of ‘haters’.