(For today only, my posts will be using Billy Joel songs as titles)
The Ukrainian's unanimous points victory can be considered a successful night's work. Ultimately, questions over Klitschko's ability to excite an audience were of less importance to him than shutting up ill-recieved challenges to his reputation. He put together yet another solid display of strategic boxing, and reaped the rewards. This still does not make him a thrilling boxer to watch, or even a particularly memorable one, but it reinforces once and for all the fact that he is a great talent nonetheless (seriously, he looks like that, and he still got with Hayden Panettiere. That certainly took talent).
David Haye can be a lot less pleased with how things went. Seriously, after all of that pre-fight hype, to lose on points in a foreign land is his worst case scenario. It has cost him his belt, and with it his shot at a lasting legacy.
I forgive Haye's brash behaviour in the leadup to this bout. It, by hook or by crook, got people interested in the match. I do not think that Haye is genuinely a jerk; he has merely recognised that playing the bad guy would be good for bigging up the event. Frankly, it is the way he earned the 50% of the total fight revenue he eventually secured. If he wants to tarnish his name for the sake of money, then that's his choice. It is at his doorstep, after all, not ours (as Brit's).
I do not, though, appreciate a fighter who does not live up to his word. Haye was more defensive than Klitschko for almost all of the 12 rounds. He demonstrated no ability to breach the Ukrainian's defences early on, or to deliver hits of real power, and failed to take risks as the fight developed. Surely he could see that, without an aggressive approach from start to finish, he was always prey to the judge's whims. All his slips and falls, whether tactical or otherwise, certainly didn't help his image in the scorers' eyes.
I fail to see exactly what Haye actually did during his months of training. Too often he threw horrible, full arm club swing hooks; rarely did he connect with any strong shots to the head. And even as the 12 round dawned, he still refused to take the risks needed to get his hits in. At some point he must have realised that Klitschko's defence wasn't going to crack; that should have been the time he decided to become more aggressive, and sacrifice some of his defensive solidity in order to land the punches he needed to.
All in all, I am just glad I didn't pay to watch this.
(To be fair, the intro's, featuring Lennox Lewis and George Foreman, were pretty sweet)
GM
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