• Haye had aimed to become world heavyweight champion and retire at 31 • The 36-year-old, who fights Tony Bellew on Saturday, now looks to quit at 38

David Haye has talked the required amount of trash to pump up pay-per-view sales for his fight with Tony Bellew at the O 2 Arena in London on Saturday night but away from the cameras he has been more considered and sounds convincing when he says he should become a world champion again and be out of boxing within two years.

David Haye tells Tony Bellew supporters: Your fighter will get drilled Read more

In whatever time he has left Haye hopes to challenge the winner of Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko, who meet in April, then his old sparring partner, Deontay Wilder, who held on to his WBC title with a fifth-round stoppage of the rightly unheralded former tennis player and failed college footballer, Gerald Washington, in Alabama at the weekend. It was a dreadful fight with a predictable ending.

There is little that is predictable about Haye so, if there is an echo in the room, it might be ringing through from 2012, when he vowed with conviction that he would quit the sport on his 31st birthday. He turned 36 last October.

“I believe I can achieve what I need to achieve before my 38th birthday but I don’t want to put a timer on it, a date on it,” he says. “I did that from when I got into the boxing ring as a kid. When I first went to Fitzroy Lodge, I said I was going to be heavyweight champion of the world and retire when I was 30. This is when I was 10. I came real close. I rushed to get that fight with Klitschko [in 2011] before my 31st birthday because I really wanted to achieve everything. That was always the plan. That was going to be my last fight.”

But Haye’s big toe famously gave up on him that night and he has had to ride the derision ever since in a stuttering comeback. Bellew would like to put a definitive full stop on Haye’s career and, in another animated but thankfully incident-free press conference in his home city of Liverpool on Monday, the world cruiserweight champion left his opponent in no doubt he will carry the fight to him for as long as he is standing.

Bellew and his trainer, Dave Coldwell [who once was in the Haye camp], believe the damage to Haye’s right shoulder that caused him to pull out of two fights with Tyson Fury and required surgery, will haunt him the longer the fight goes. Haye, naturally, does not think so.

“I need to warm it up every day,” he admits, “stuff I should have done before it was injured. I do loads of stuff in my left arm that I never used to do because of having the injured right shoulder, it has allowed me to realise that I don’t want this one to go. I believe my right shoulder is better now than it was before. I’ve built all the muscles up around it so it is stronger, it is more solid. That was a worry at first. When I started sparring, the timing was out a little bit, obviously, but, since I started landing, since the timing is back, it feels as good as it ever has done.”

Haye reckons he has the most concussive single-punch power in boxing. “I’ve got no question of that. My punching power passes any other heavyweight,” he says. “One punch, two punch, however you want to tally it up. I definitely believe if you give me any part of your chin, you are going to sleep.”

Physically, if not verbally, Haye is more imposing. He is a cut monster who will probably still come in under 17st. Bellew, who has always taken pride in his rounded appearance and enjoys life away from the gym, will definitely be in deficit. Haye, one of the few vegans in boxing, says: “People say, ‘Where do you get your strength from?’ Well, where does an ape get his strength from? They are 20 times stronger than humans and they don’t rely on a meat-based diet. They eat plants all day long. It’s a myth that you need meat for strength.

“If you strip off all the body fat, Bellew would still be a light-heavyweight. If you strip off the body fat from me, I’d be exactly what I am today: that’s the difference. When you see me on the scales on Friday, you’re going to see a very close resemblance to the day I stepped on the scales nearly nine years to the day against Enzo Maccarinelli, in 2008.”

Haye has been turning back the clock for years now. Bellew, five years younger, hopes the Londoner has mistimed his latest calculations.