Jiri Prochazka says he would have handled things differently than Tom Aspinall did at UFC 321.
Aspinall (15-3 MMA, 8-1 UFC) was poked in the eye by Ciryl Gane in Round 1 of their heavyweight title fight last month in Abu Dhabi and was rendered unable to continue after losing vision in his eye. Aspinall was criticized by various fighters, including T.J. Dillashaw, who accused him of taking the easy way out.
While Prochazka didn’t exactly say that, he implied that he would have continued if he was in Aspinall’s shoes.
“My opinion, I want to finish the fight,” Prochazka said on the “Believe You Me” podcast. “I want to win the fight. Just give me a little time, I will recover myself or I will use more my intuition or whatever, but I want to finish the fight, I want to win, and all the people came to see this fight – especially the main event.
“But maybe Tom started to calculate too much. Like, ‘Maybe I’m not too good to fight him, maybe next time I’ll be better prepared.’ Or if something happened and he will win. That’s just maybe about the mind. You start thinking like this in these situations, how it can change the fight. I really don’t know. Maybe it was so serious. Ask Tom.”
Prochazka faced a similar situation when he was poked in the eye during his light heavyweight bout against Jamahal Hill at UFC 311 in January. He wound up winning the fight by third-round TKO.
Prochazka was asked about the eye poke incident after the fight and had a similar point of view.
“I will play for the doctors the game that I’m OK,” Prochazka said during the UFC 311 post-fight presser. “If he wants to stop something like that, no way to stop the fight because this. There’s no way to stop the fight because of an eye poke. I’ve got one more eye. We are here to win the fight. I know there are rules and all these things, but this is the true sport of man. The fight. You fighting with eyes, no eyes, it doesn’t matter. For me, it’s fight till the end.”
