Tom Aspinall hasn’t been having the best time lately.
At UFC 321, Aspinall made the first defense of his undisputed heavyweight title, taking on Ciryl Gane in the main event. It was a disaster. In the first round, Gane delivered an illegal eye poke to Aspinall that rendered the champion unable to continue, resulting in a no-contest. Aspinall’s decision not to continue drew significant criticism from fans, and also from UFC CEO Dana White, who called the outcome a “pain in the ass.”
Well, Aspinall hasn’t enjoyed it either.
“I’ve been having a lovely time, in and out of the hospital, having all kinds of different tests done to my eyes, speaking to specialists, speaking to surgeons, speaking to doctors,” Aspinall said on his YouTube channel.
“Oh, it’s been a fantastic time.”
And as for White’s disappointment with him, Aspinall had a response for why he didn’t continue fighting after the eye poke.
“I didn’t continue, and I’ll tell you why I didn’t continue: because I’m not a f*cking dummy,” Aspinall said. “I’m not going to go out there and fight one of the best strikers in the world if I can’t see. I know, as an MMA fighter, things are going to happen in the fight that compromise you.
“Go back and watch my fight with Arlovski. At the end of the first round, he punched me right in the eyeball. For the rest of the fight, I couldn’t see him out of that eye. That’s fine. If you get punched or kicked in the eye, that’s fine. If you get double eye poked in both eyes and you’ve got no vision because of a foul, why should I carry on? So some dummy can look and say, ‘Oh yeah, Tom just got knocked out’?
“I ain’t going to fight if I can’t see anything because of a foul. If it’s a legal move, we have to fight through it. That’s what we do as fighters. But when it’s a foul, why am I going to put my health at risk when I cannot see at all?”
And as for the fans who have suggested Aspinall quit because he was losing the fight, Aspinall also has a message for them.
“I felt like the fight was going OK,” Aspinall said. “It was going pretty much to plan. There was this big notion in the media before that I was just going to run through Ciryl Gane. I might look like an idiot, sometimes I might talk like an idiot, but when it comes to fighting, I know what I’m talking about. And I know that Ciryl Gane is a tough matchup for me. Really good defensively.
“If you want to break the fight down a little bit, Ciryl’s got really good defense, and he moves really, really well on his feet. I knew that I had to stand in range and take a few punches from Ciryl to be able to land my own shots. We knew that was happening. …
“Yeah, nosebleeds happen in a fight. Was he hitting me with a few jabs? Yes. Was I hitting him with a few shots as well? Yes. I thought it was going to be a five-round fight. I knew it was going to be a long and tough fight.”
But while Aspinall seems to be frustrated with Dana White and some of the fanbase, the man he’s most frustrated with is Gane, who he believes was intentionally cheating.
“I think that when it initially happened, I didn’t think much of it,” Aspinall said. “I thought, ‘Accidental eye poke, whatever.’ When I watched it back, that’s when I really got the gist of what’s going on. The guy was trying to f*cking poke my eyes out, all the way through that round. Multiple exchanges, nearly every exchange that I could put him in danger, he had his fingers out, pointing toward my eyes. … The guy was cheating from the first second, and the way he wanted to win that fight was to have me compromised by cheating.”
And Aspinall was compromised, so much so that he still is. The heavyweight champion revealed he’s still having issues with his vision, including continued double vision, rendering him unable to train for the moment. Which means he doesn’t know when he will be able to rematch Ciryl Gane.
“I have no idea,” Aspinall said. “Absolutely no idea. Obviously, I’m very keen, very keen to get back and beat this guy up, but I’ve got to be 100 percent right. So, whenever the eye’s good to go, that’s when I’ll do it.”
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