According to David Haye (28-3, 26 KOs), he won the battle of the mind games on Thursday’s press conference with Tony Bellew (29-2-1, 19 KOs) for their rematch on Saturday at the O2 Arena in London, England.
Bellew lost his cool and pushed Haye at the press conference when the two of them were head to head. I think the pressure is starting to get to Bellew, and he doesn’t know what to do to try and gain an edge.
This was supposed to be a simple face off. Haye was doing nothing more than doing the old head to head business that fighter do all the time. Bellew is knows the deal, so he shouldn’t have lost his composure and shoved Haye. Bellew claims he shoved Haye because he invaded his space. He didn’t want the 37-year-old Haye that close to him. Fortunately there were injuries.
Bellew’s little shove could have resulted in an injury to Haye, and that would have cost a lot of lost time and money with the fight needing to be postponed for however long for the injury to heal. Shoving a fighter is not a good idea when they have the kind of history of injuries that Haye has.
With Bellew, it’s hard to know what he was thinking when he decided to shove Haye. Perhaps it was a planned move on Bellew’s part. Maybe he was always going to shove Haye, even if he wasn’t even close to him. If the shove was part of the theatrics of the build-up for the fight, it wasn’t enough to build more excitement. Boxing fans aren’t into watching shoving matches.
“I will light the fuse and ignite into life at The O2,” Haye told Sky Sports News. “I don’t care about him, he’s irrelevant. It’s all about me. I got it wrong last time. This time I got it right. He pushed me to get a reaction. It’s a weak move, but I believe I won the battle of the mind games.”
Bellew isn’t the same fighter as last time he fought Haye. Bellew seemed a lot calmer last March in the weeks before the fight. He wasn’t going berserk and boiling over left and right. Something has changed with Bellew, and I think it could be him starting to realize that he royally stepped in it this time. Bellew seems to know what’s going to happen on Saturday, and it’s really bugging him to know end.
It’s one of those deals where you know you’re going to get beaten, and you can’t do anything to keep it from happening. Perhaps the shove was Bellew’s way of trying to unnerve Haye to make him afraid of attacking him on the night. I don’t think it’s going to work, but you can’t blame Bellew for trying.
“It was just a little push and shove,” Bellew said to Sky Sports News. “He just wanted to get closer. We came close to kissing, but it’s not that kind of party, and I had to remove him from my space.”
Shoving someone that is coming off of a bad Achilles injury is probably the worst possible thing someone could do to his opponent. It would be the equivalent of someone jumping on a person that just knee surgery and making them hold their weight. Haye can’t afford to let himself get shoved again by Bellew, because there’s too much risk involved for his surgically repaired Achilles.
Just imagine what would have happened if Haye had stumbled backwards causing his Achilles to tear or suffer a bad strain. It’s only been a little over 12 months since Haye’s surgery. Some people believe it takes forever to come back fully from a bad Achilles.
It was more than a little push by Bellew. He put a lot of power in that shove, because it sent Haye clear across the room, and Haye isn’t small. It’s just lucky for Bellew that Haye didn’t fall over and break a leg or tear his Achilles again. Can you imagine the heat that would pour down over Bellew’s head if Haye suffered a bad injury as a result of Bellew’s shove? It would have been a nightmare for Bellew, and he would have been left jabbering and stumbling over his words about how he thought he was going to be kissed.
At Friday’s weigh-in, security might want to make sure there’s no possibility of Bellew choosing to escalate tensions by giving Haye another shove during the face off. If they need to setup a fence or a glass partition in between the two fighters to keep Bellew from shoving Haye again, then so be it.
There needs to be some safety involved. If Bellew feels like he can just put hands Haye and shove him, then it’s a good idea to make sure that doesn’t happen a second time. I’m all for a glass partition or a good sturdy fence that can be put in between the two fighters.
This could be grim for Bellew if Haye’s body holds together on Saturday night. Bellew may be in trouble if Haye doesn’t rupture his Achilles again or blowout his surgically repaired right shoulder a second time.
Haye looked like of flat-footed and stiff on his feet during his public workout this week. He was moving around a lot slower than he used to. Haye suffered a severe injury in rupturing his Achilles last year in his previous fight with Bellew on March 4, 2017. This was Haye’s second really bad injury. He had torn his right shoulder in 2012. That injury took him 4 years to come back from.
Bellew has been working hard to try and get under the skin of Haye ever since the rematch was signed, and he’s no success. Haye hasn’t bitten in Bellew’s feeble attempts to get him riled up. If Bellew was trying to get Haye upset by shoving him, I was an utter fail. Bellew shoved Haye during a press conference for the first fight, and it clearly bothered him, but not this time. Haye just stood and smiled while the security was all over Bellew. Even Eddie Hearn was getting involved. I’m not sure what Hearn would have done, but he acted like he was trying to stop it. Hearn had such a hard look to his face when the fracas started. It was priceless.