Ciryl Gane is tired of being labeled a cheater because of what happened with Tom Aspinall (and Alex Pereira).
The newly minted undisputed heavyweight champion went on the Zack En Roue Libre show to discuss all the bad press he’s gotten over the past year, namely that he’s a dirty fighter who poked Aspinall in the eyes intentionally and finished Pereira with illegal shots to the back of the head. In his opinion, Aspinall has taken the whole situation (which has resulted in him being forced to relinquish
the title) too far.
“We knew he was a little mentally fragile,” Gane said in French. “Brother, you got poked in the eye. You have the right to stop. That’s your right. But you don’t need to do everything you did. Honestly when my finger went into his eye, my feeling was that it wasn’t forceful at all. It looked forceful, but it didn’t feel forceful to me.”
Gane noted that he’s also getting fouled out there in the cage, just like everyone else in the sport.
“It happened to me before actually, against Derrick Lewis when I won the [interim] belt,” he said. “I saw double for three or four minutes. He poked me in the eye, and my vision hadn’t recovered and I kept fighting like that. I didn’t complain about it. These things happen, you know what I mean?”
The new heavyweight champ described the moment against Aspinall as an attempt at head control gone wrong.
“It’s posting, you see, and it slips while he’s moving forward,” Gane said. “Something that happens almost every weekend, except they decided to focus on me every time like I’m a cheater. Even Jon Jones, it happened to him plenty of times, and it happened to plenty of others. But no, we don’ talk about that because it happens so often.”
“It’s not like I’m saying this to brush it off,” he continued. “It happens every weekend. Unfortunately, low blows happen because you throw a leg kick and the guy ducks … An opponent turns his head, so obviously a punch is gonna hit the back of their head.”
“These things are trivial. It happens all the time, like you have no idea how much it happens. There’s something that happens during every fight. In one night, you have between eight and twelve fights. In every fight, you’re gonna have something. It’s our sport. That’s how it is … The guy turns his head. Pop. Pop. Pop.”
Gane’s laissez-faire attitude towards fouling probably isn’t going to convince anyone that he’s not recklessly stabbing people in the eye and punching them in the back of the head. We expect portions of this video to live on forever on Alex Pereira’s Instagram account where the former middleweight and light heavyweight champ is still raging about back of the head punches he believes cost him their White House fight.
“Bon Gamin” is right, though: fouls happen way too much, and they’ll continue to happen so long as there’s no consequences when they happen. That leaves it up to MMA referees to grow a spine and start taking points, which we’ve been talking about for years but still hasn’t happened yet. Other than that? See if Gane does it again when he fights Josh Hokit at UFC 334 on November 14th.
