Tom Aspinall and UFC are getting along about as well as Maxwell Kirshner and Jack Moss in The Thing With Two Heads.
Perhaps UFC color commentator Joe Rogan is taking sides. Or maybe the millionaire podcaster is simply expounding on a topic that is now five months old. Either way, Rogan suggested Aspinall was getting “busted up” by Ciryl Gane prior to the challenger’s eye poke, one severe enough to bring a halt to their UFC 321 headliner.
“It is a crime in the sport that the fight with Aspinall got
stopped the way it did, that he eye poked him,” Rogan said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “It’s a crime, because that fight was playing out in a very interesting direction, because Aspinall was having a really hard time touching that guy. He was getting busted up. He was getting touched up a lot. Ciryl’s jab is legit.”
Fedor Emelianenko was getting touched up by Andrei Arlovski — and we all know how that ended.
“How many times has he even been in the second round? My thought was, the real problem that Aspinall was going to present is in the grappling,” Rogan continued. “He’s a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, he’s a big f*cker, he’s fast, he’s got a power double. He explodes, but when he was standing there with Gane, this was the first time that he was ever in front of a guy who was agile and quick and very technical. Gane was doing a lot of sneaky sh*t.”
I would classify a knuckle-deep eye poke as “sneaky shit.”
Aspinall (15-3, 1 NC) has been stuck on the sidelines while his surgically-repaired eyes continue to heal. That hasn’t stopped the UFC heavyweight champion from sleeping with the enemy, so to speak. As for Gane (13-2, 1 NC), he scored prized real estate on the UFC White House card for an interim title fight opposite Alex Pereira in June.
