Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane ended UFC 321 in a disappointing no-contest after an eye poke delivered to the heavyweight champion left him unable to continue.<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the fight, Aspinall lashed out at a chorus of boos from the Abu Dhabi crowd while he also faced criticism that perhaps he didn\u2019t want to restart the fight after Gane was doing far better than most expected. UFC CEO Dana White certainly didn\u2019t make that kind of accusation, but he also knows it was ultimately Aspinall\u2019s call on whether or not he ultimately continued in the fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel the way everybody feels. Great showing, shitty ending,\u201d White said at the UFC 321 post-fight press conference. \u201cI think that after the [Jon] Jones fight, a lot of people wrote Ciryl Gane off. He looked damn good tonight. It looked like we were in for a few rounds, and it was going to be a good fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t make people fight. If I want to put together a fight, I can\u2019t make people fight. You definitely can\u2019t make somebody continue if they feel they\u2019ve been injured. Only Tom knows what happened. Could he see? Couldn\u2019t he see? Could he continue? Only he knows that.\u201d<\/p>\n
As soon as the eye poke happened, Aspinall received medical attention and kept holding a wet towel up to his face as he attempted to recover.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately as time passed it was clear that Aspinall was saying that his vision was completely compromised, which effectively ended the fight. With the result as a no-contest, White admitted that there\u2019s really no other choice but to run it back, even if that\u2019s not what the UFC was obviously hoping for after the heavyweight title already sat dormant for over a year.<\/p>\n
\u201cTotal pain in the ass but yes [we\u2019ll book the rematch],\u201d White confirmed. \u201cThey\u2019re both in shape, other than whatever\u2019s wrong with his eye. Both guys are not injured. As soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
White revealed that Aspinall was transported to a local hospital as soon as the fight was over so he obviously didn\u2019t make any appearance at the press conference to address his injury.<\/p>\n
That said, White admits he was really impressed with Gane\u2019s showing and if there\u2019s any positive takeaway from the fight, it\u2019s that the odds in the rematch should be much, much closer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that because of the Jon Jones fight, I think everybody was sleeping on Ciryl Gane and kind of wrote him off,\u201d White said after Gane lost to Jones in 2023. \u201cI feel like, I\u2019m sure in his camp he was training like an animal for this fight and it\u2019s unfortunately that it ended the way that it did.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that there probably will be a lot more interest in the rematch after they saw he had Tom bloodied up. Tom didn\u2019t want to continue in the fight. The rematch is very interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane ended UFC 321 in a disappointing no-contest after an eye poke delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,701,44,41,39,42,40,640,702,3194],"class_list":{"0":"post-240879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-latest-news","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-top-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topnews","14":"tag-topstories","15":"tag-ufc","16":"tag-ufc-news","17":"tag-videos"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240879\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}