UFC 321 ended on a disappointing note after the eagerly awaited heavyweight title clash between Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane ended in a first round no-contest ruling after a bad eye-poke left the champion unable to continue.
However, while frustrated with the outcome, White has confirmed that the plan is now to run back the fight as soon as possible once Aspinall has fully recovered.
“I feel the way everybody feels. Great showing, sh*tty ending,” White said at the UFC 321 post-fight press conference. “I 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.
“I can’t make people fight. If I want to put together a fight, I can’t make people fight. You definitely can’t make somebody continue if they feel they’ve been injured. Only Tom knows what happened. Could he see? Couldn’t he see? Could he continue? Only he knows that.”
While White didn’t appear to be overly sympathetic to Aspinall’s plight, slow motion replays have shown that not only did the champ suffer a deep eye poke to his right eye, but he was also poked in the left eye at the same time.
“Total pain in the ass but yes,” White confirmed when asked if the fight would be rebooked. “They’re both in shape, other than whatever’s wrong with his eye. Both guys are not injured. As soon as possible.”
White went on to praise Gane, who had been getting the better of the first round striking action prior to the unintentional eye-poke that brought the fight to a sudden halt.
“I think that because of the Jon Jones fight, I think everybody was sleeping on Ciryl Gane and kind of wrote him off,” White said in reference to Gane’s 1st round submission loss to Jones a couple of years ago. “I feel like, I’m sure in his camp he was training like an animal for this fight and it’s unfortunately that it ended the way that it did.
“I think that there probably will be a lot more interest in the rematch after they saw he had Tom bloodied up. Tom didn’t want to continue in the fight. The rematch is very interesting.”
