Adam Haniver:

Hey everybody. Adam Azim, eh? Wow, What a boxer. 22, I believe he is. 22 years old, phenomenon. Just thought on the way back, just have a quick chat about Adam Azim. So as I mentioned, 22 years old, he's just come off the back of winning that title against Sergey Lipinets. Must show massive respect to Sergey Lipinets. What a tough guy. I'm sure that nose was broken quite early on because it was dripping quite profusely. Face absolutely mashed up to bits. Obviously not all the nice things that we, you know, that's, we like to hear about boxing, but it's, it's all the bits that unfortunately are part and parcel. And my opinion, they probably should have pulled him out a little bit  earlier. But then again, I don't know the boxer, I don't know what his strengths are., I don't know if he had anything left in the locker that they thought he could pull out the bag. Don't know. 

But back to Azim, looking at it not just from a technical or tactical point of view, because we always talk about technique, don't we? And we always talk about tactics, but just from a bit of a game smarts. Okay, so the kind of, how smart is it, the game of boxing and what sort of things were happening during that bout? Obviously they had a plan. I think maybe the first three rounds, maybe four, keeping it nice and long, keeping that jab there in his face. And what I liked about that is that Azim seems very adept at movement, but very efficient movement. You don't see him bouncing, running all around the place. He seems to slide and glide across the ring. There's not a lot of this hopping and bounding or any efficient movement. He just pushes, kind of driving those toes into the canvas and sliding across. And because he's able to slide across, he's able to fix his feet when he wants. 

And I can't remember which round the knockdown was. I think it was the third or the fourth. So he's just pushed off to the right. Lipinets has decided to absolutely launch at him and throw a big left hook. And he's actually caught Azim. But Azim has seen him coming, slammed his right foot on the ground and then been able to kind of pull that left hook in and catch him flush and down he goes. But I think it's again, just that kind of understanding about the harmony between mobility and stability. He's very mobile when he wants to be, and he's very stable when he wants to be. And he's able to switch between those two things really, really well. So is part of that conditioning? Absolutely. Very, very well conditioned. I remembering him in the amateurs as well, just being able to kind. He bends his knees and very predatory when he moves, but it's very small and efficient. And then bang, stops, change of direction, generation of force, rotation. Bang, bang, bang on the target. What an athlete. What a specimen. So really great on that part. 

The jab, again, what I liked about the jab is all. All jabs seem to be different. Okay, they seem to be touch jabs and then a ramrod jab, aiming for different parts, aiming a little bit lower to the body, but not just belly or face, they're just vague targets. But going to the forehead, then coming to the chin, the nose slightly off to the side with a bit of variation. But then when he's going to the body, it's chest, it's belly button, you know, it's not just head or body. There's so many different areas to jab to, really keeping Lipinets unable to throw his shots. I mean, you look at the stance of the guy and you're thinking, right, he's going to get close. He's got to throw threes and fours, combinations, punches and bunches and try and put it all over his team. 

But Azim, one, with his movement and balance, was not letting him set his feet to throw these shots. But two, this variation on tempo with the jab, touch, touch, some fast, some slow. He could never, never set his feet. Azim always found himself just at that kind of long range slash, edge of range where he could keep the range where he wanted it. And for the first three or four, he was managing to keep that nice and long and just dictated that space. Now, as we always say range is one of the hardest things to control in boxing. And it just seemed very, very easy. Sometimes he'd even leave the jab there afterwards, kind of spearing out, just touching, touching sometimes on his forehead, sometimes right in his eyeballs so he couldn't see. But keeping him defensive and keeping him at bay. So he's always having to adjust his feet to try and get in and throw those combinations. Azim didn't let him do it. 

And I just thought that was really, really impressive. Almost seasoned old man, sort of game smarts, ring craft, whatever you want to call it. I kind like the game smarts or game sense sort of notion. I think whether it was a tactical thing and they decided to change it, or whether Azim just said, you know what, I am going to sit with him now and start breaking him down. It wasn't like Azim was very tight on the inside. As in, when your stance is at long range to short to medium, it tends to change a lot. I don't think he changes stance that much. He obviously did get a bit smaller and a bit tighter, but he just felt like he was able to see everything still at that short range, you know, the picture was still there. You could still see all the little tells of when the shots were coming, and he was able to see where the openings were, those kind of affordances, those invitations to act, ripping that uppercut up through the middle. Yes. Some of the left hooks were low and, you know, they were low. And I think he did deserve to have those points taken off because they were low. Did he mean it? Don't think so at all. Just the guys on top of him. He's quite a small, compact guy, and that target that he's probably used to seemed a little bit smaller than usual. But anyway, I think it was never in doubt that he could find pretty much any target that you want to, whether it be uppercuts through the middle, hooks around the corner, touching long. The whole arsenal was there. The whole ability to read Lipinets was there. He just seems to have the game smarts to be able to read people. And I think that's one of the hardest things in boxing. That's what the greats do. They are able to. You know, I did mention that in my last episode about having those kind of game smarts and those abilities to read. And I mentioned Dalton Smith, who is about for him further down the line. I don't want to go into all the bits and pieces. I don't know enough about pro-boxing to say, why aren't they are boxing? And I don't care about that on this podcast. This is about skill, not about politics. And I think they're quite similar in that respect, those two. They both have a lot of game smarts, the ability to read people, to perceive and to act, but also to act and perceive. And let me just qualify that, if you're not quite sure what I mean. Perception, action, what I see then informs how I act, what defences, what punches I have. But it doesn't go end there. It's not a linear thing where it's perceived to act. It's then act to perceive. So then what you always see from Azim, he's moving his head. He's literally moving his head and his feet in different positions where he can see new information. He can see a new target area or might just come over his lead foot a little bit or bring it off to the left and his head follows. He can see that left hook to the body, he can see that left hook to the head, he can see that jab, screw shot, whatever it is, on that lead side and see if it's open. And he's got the speed, not just of his body. He hasn't just got those physical capabilities where he can react, but he's got that speed of mind to see, right, if I just move over here, move my feet to that side and move ahead, there's new affordances to act, there's new opportunities for me to act. And he's able to do that same if he shifts his weight to the right, he's able to see the right uppercut, the right hand. So he's very, very good at actually creating opportunities, in other words, acting to perceive, which closes that perception, action, feedback loop. So this is why I do see him going all the way. You know, he's won a world title, not as one of the major world titles, but I think he can go all the way in one of the most demanding competitive professional weight classes. There are all the guys that are in there, the Haneys, the Garcia's, all these people, you know, and of course Smith. All these people that are in there are all dangerous, dangerous people. And all of them have very different skill sets as well that will offer Adam lots of different problems. But I just see Adam as a very, very highly well rounded boxer, even though he's still 22. Very, very young man. 

I was very, very lucky and fortunate to work briefly with Adam at the European Championships, where he won gold in the European Championships. I was handing up in the corner for a couple of battles in the final. He won. And that actually had a really tough bout in the final. I think it was. I might be wrong. I think it was against a Georgian and didn't actually perform that well. It already, it already knocked out two people. So Adam already knocked out two people in the prior rounds and it was sort of deemed tag to get boxer of the tournament. But he didn't perform that well in the final. But what he did do, he adapted to a different style of opponent. So Adam's able to do that. So one, I think he's got the street smarts, the physical capabilities. Have to be both there as well. I do hear lots of information about Adam as well, who just does nothing but watch tape, watches footage of boxers, some of the greats, and he's just like apprentice of the sport, has to know your tools. And sometimes you might say just because you're watching something on YouTube doesn't mean you can do it in competition, doesn't mean you can do it in training. But actually sometimes I think there is YouTube and video gets a bad rap if you are able to see something and be curious about it and try and apply and explore that in training. And it works. Obviously it's not going to work first time. It takes a long time to kind of hone that and contextualize that and put it into sort of a lot of random practice for it to start showing in competition. But he's obviously doing that. It seems like he's very curious about stuff, looks at it and then applies it and puts it in his own context or assimilates it into his own style without going too much into the Bruce Lee kind of metaphors there. 

So I just think he was very seasoned, like he'd grown up even more. Dealt with some really potential big banana skin there. I don't think the guy was a massive banger at all, was he? But even if he did have a bit of spite behind his shots, he didn't let him do it. Boxing, without sounding too cliche, is about hit and not get hit. And if we boil it down to that, Azim was just able to make sure the guy had no balance all the time. Which when we look at The Box Gathering box model, we start at the top with balance and shape. If you are balanced more often than your opponent, you are more likely to be successful. Of course, you then have to move and make people miss and move into a position that is more optimal. He's able to choose where he wants to be in the ring, but not only that, choose the range and position that he wants with his opponent. As he sat in the pocket a little bit more with his opponent and got closer, he was starting to move around the corners. Very Lomachenko, even Ricky Hatton-esque. And it just seemed effortless. And he just had that understanding of when to sit in front of the guy and break him down and break his heart and bring up through the middle, but also when to show him an angle and just offset the guy with his balance and then come back with new shots. And I thought that was really impressive. So the balance and shape stuff there and then the next part in the boxing model is about position. So where are you positioned so often, say PBP position-before-punch. And he just has that street smarts. Whether it's an element of a sort of cognitive approach where he's really thinking about it as a process, that could be, well be something that he does in training. But he just seems to have this very innate ability to understand how to fight, to understand how to box, to understand how the rules dictate his behaviours around what he does. And it's just very, very impressive. 

I've done no real work with him at all. But when I, when I was in the, in the championships with him in the Europeans, just very struck by how he was only a young boy then, 15, 16 as a junior, but just struck by how nice a kid is. And I know that sounds wishy-washy, but you know, we always talk, I often very talk about athlete, boxer, person as a triangle. You could be the best boxer in the world, have all the skill set. But if you're a poor athlete and you're getting injured and you can't produce power, force, you haven't got stamina, it's irrelevant. You could be the best boxer and the best athlete. You got all the tools physically, you got all the street smarts, but actually you're a pain in the ass as a person. Uncoachable. Don't listen. People don't want to build relationships with you because of how you are. So that also will dictate your level of success. 

From the very small amount that I know of him, tiniest amount, just seemed like a really, really nice lad from, from the get go. Very affable, likeable, just very bright and breezy. And even from then everyone knew that he was going to be a superstar. So I suppose the question now is how far can he go? I believe he can go very far because of the athlete, the boxer and the person. That triangle is very, very strong. I don't see many sort of leaks there. And the other thing about it as well is that it just seems like the tip of the iceberg as well with him. That performance was exceptional in many ways, but it was probably a 6 out of 10 in terms of what he's capable of. And that's the exciting thing about him. It wasn't Adam Azim at his very best. He didn't need it. He could have just gone an extra gear, two, three, four gears and put that guy to bed particularly early if he wanted to. But he just knew that it's a system, it's a breaking down, it's a process and he had that ability to do it professionally and clinically. And I'm just very excited to watch him. And when you do hear all these names like your Garcia's and Haneys and things like that.

Too soon for him at the moment? I think so. Not that he couldn't beat those boys, but it is too early because you know, you've got to look at it as a career and he wants to make money and he wants to get more, more experience etc and build and build and build. But I know he can beat those, those lads. I know he can beat those lads. He just has it all. Yeah. Anyway, really excited. Just thought as I'm driving home now that I would get the whole Adam Azim watching that fight off my chest. Anyway, brilliant stuff. Looking forward to seeing how far he can go. Anyway, that's my my 2 cents worth on Adam Azim. Cheers all.