Jiri Prochazka: Tom Aspinall perhaps thought ‘maybe I’m not good enough to fight’ Ciryl Gane after UFC 321 eye poke

Tom Aspinall and the errant eye poke controversy of UFC 321 has had many weighing in on the situation, with a former UFC light heavyweight champion offering up his viewpoints. This happened during a recent episode of the Believe You Me podcast, which features co-hosts Michael Bisping and Paul Felder.

Jiri Prochazka was the fighter in question who gave his own breakdown regarding how he felt about the no-contest from the Tom Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane heavyweight title fight in late October. Some felt like Aspinall chose to quit and didn’t exhibit a stereotypical idea of a warrior’s valor. Conversely, many thought it was reasonable to be honest about how compromised he was, where the broader focus was more on the sport engaging in reform efforts to eliminate eyepokes outright.

An excerpt of the podcast touching on the Abu Dhabi-based UFC pay-per-view headliner was taken and posted to X account @Redcorner_MMA, as Prochazka said,

“Maybe Tom [Aspinall] started to think too much, like ‘maybe I’m not good enough to fight him,’ ‘maybe next time I’ll be better prepared,’ or if something happen and he will win, whatever. That’s just about the mind. You start thinking like this in these situations — how it can change the fight. So I really don’t know.M aybe it was so serious, ask Tom.”

Jiri Prochazka implies what he would have done in Tom Aspinall’s UFC 321 situation

In another excerpt from the BYM show that saw the former UFC light heavyweight champion express thoughts tied to how the Aspinall-Gane bout wrapped up, as Jiri Prochazka stated [via MMA Junkie],

“My opinion, I want to finish the fight. 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.”