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Much hype surrounded Tom Aspinall heading into his headlining bout at UFC 321. While he didn’t lose and remains the heavyweight champion, events from the fight caused many to doubt him, including one UFC legend.
Aside from one mishap on his way to gold, the Brit bulldozed his way to the top of the division with few problems. Before his unfortunate outing on Saturday, many considered him the man to beat Jon Jones and subsequently take the reins as the greatest heavyweight in UFC history.
Those claims have since subsided, and Tom Aspinall must leave no doubt when he next steps into the octagon. Two men he needs to prove wrong are former UFC fighters Chael Sonnen and Anthony Smith.
While analyzing the outcome, Sonnen and Smith both sided against Aspinall’s decision to pull out of the fight.
“You had a job to do and for whatever reason you guys did whatever you did and you didn’t do your job,” Smith said in the aftermath of UFC 321.
“I’m not saying it’s Tom’s fault, and I’m not going to pretend that I know how bad it is or isn’t. I think Chael made a poetic point: That you have to be used to or willing to fight with one eye.”
Not everybody sitting outside the cage can have a valid opinion on fighting with impaired vision, but Anthony Smith is one of them.
‘Lionheart’ urged Tom Aspinall to continue with his injury as he once did.
“I did it in Singapore,” Smith continued. “Everybody talks about it all the time, where the lady’s waving stuff in front of my eyes. I can’t see it.”
“So, what do I do? I just walk away. I said, ‘Let’s fight.’ You either want to or you don’t. And my fight wasn’t for a world title [and] I didn’t have Ciryl Gane in front of me throwing bombs, but the second there was an issue, I knew that I wanted to continue.”
“I know what to say. You never say I can’t see if you want to continue to fight.”
Related: UFC 321 main event ends in no contest after eye poke renders Tom Aspinall unable to continue
Chael Sonnen weighed in, demanding that all fighters train to combat issues that could occur inside the octagon.
“If your eye gets swollen and it gets shut, or if your nose gets clogged and you can’t breathe, [work on it in training because] then you’re kind of used to these things.”
“Tom said something. Look, we’ve got to dwell on a guy in a really bad moment. But, to dwell on him, he said, ‘I got poked in the eye, I can’t see.’ If you got poked in the eye and you’re injured, we have a totally different conversation.”
“If you get poked in the eye and you can’t see, generally in our sport, it’s something that you’ve got to push through.”
