By Scott Gilfoid: David Haye says he initially thought the April 9 fight between unbeaten giant heavyweights Charles Martin (23-0-1, 21 KOs) and Anthony Joshua (15-0, 15 KOs) would be a mismatch with the 6’6” Joshua wiping the deck with the inexperienced 6’5” Martin.
However, the more Haye has looked into the fight and learned about how talented the American Martin is, he’s seeing the fight now an evenly matched contest between two giant heavyweights that are both lacking in the experience department. With that being said, Haye still sees the heavily muscled 245lb Joshua as having the better experience of the two fighters.
“When the fight was first announced, I thought Anthony would blast him out of the water easily but the more I’ve looked in to it, the more I’ve spoken to people I respect in the boxing game, they’re saying Martin is better than his record suggests,” said Haye to skysports.com. “He’s not proved things in the ring as yet but people I respect say he’s a threat to any heavyweight on the planet.”
If Joshua does have a better resume than Martin, then it’s just a fraction better. If you look at Joshua’s experience as a pro, he’s only fought one good heavyweight and that the injured Dillian Whyte, who fought with an injured left shoulder last December.
Whyte’s left shoulder held up for one and a half rounds before giving out on him completely in the 2nd round. From there on, Whyte was fighting with just his right hand and nearly helpless. Whyte’s left has always been his power hand, and he should have never come into the fight with the injury.
For Martin’s part, he’s faced Vyacheslav Glazkov, who fell apart under the heat that Martin put on him in the 3rd round of their fight last January. Glazkov badly injured his right knee after taking a head shot from Martin in the 3r round. Glazkov didn’t come into the fight with a bad knee injury. The injury came after Martin nailed him with some nice head shots in the third round of the fight.
“They’re both in a similar position in terms of experience. I actually believe Joshua has fought a higher calibre of opposition than Martin,” said Haye. “It’s a perfect fight for him to take – Eddie Hearn and Sky Sports have mapped his career out to get to The O2 arena, a sell-out crowd, fighting a big American guy for a world heavyweight championship.”
I think the whole experience business is overblown to be honest. It really doesn’t matter if Martin has more experience or Haye. What matters is their amateur backgrounds and how well they’ve progressed with their skills since they turned pro. In looking at the way Martin fights, I think he’s got the better skills than Joshua.
You can see Martin thinking in the ring when he fights, and making adjustments constantly to what’s going on. As far as I can tell, Joshua just bum rushes his opponents and tries to bang them out as fast as possible in his pro fights. There’s no technique or adjustments being made. It’s just straight ahead attacking with Joshua.
That approach has worked extremely well for Joshua against dreadful opposition that his promoter Eddie Hearn has dug up and carted into the ring for him. But against a talent like Martin, I think Joshua is going to get found out quick unless he can come up with some boxing strategy to try and win the fight.
There ae some fighters that do well when you feed them fodder right off the bat in their pro careers, because they take it easy on their opponents and use them to learn different things that they’ll need later in their careers when their promoters ramp up their competition. But then there are other fighters like Joshua who just use the fodder to easily blast them out in one or two rounds without learning anything. Joshua is the type of heavyweight that you DON’T want to feed fodder to, because he picks up a lot of bad habits in fighting those type of horrible fighters.
Joshua looks totally sloppy now in his fights compared to when he was fighting in the amateur ranks, and I’m not sure that he’s going to be able to unlearn all his sloppy habits. Instead of feeding Joshua 3rd tier cannon fodder after he turned pro in 2014, Hearn should have been putting him in with fringe contenders from the 1st tier ranks. After all, Joshua did win a gold medal in the 2012 LONDON Olympics, didn’t he? With gold medal winners, you don’t feed them 3rd tier fodder. You put them in with 1st tier talents because if you don’t, then you’re wasting their careers by putting them in with opposition that they were able to beat when they first became amateurs.
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