Aspinall has faced an unprecedented wave of criticism after his UFC 321 bout versus Ciryl Gane, the first attempted defense of his newly undisputed Heavyweight title. Not only has Aspinall been panned for failing to continue fighting after a nasty eye poke (see here), but the performance itself wasn’t up to Aspinall’s usual standard of mauling his opponents in the very first exchange. Instead, Gane and Aspinall traded punches for most of the first round, and Aspinall ended up with a bloody nose before the abbreviated finish.
Unsurprisingly, “Bones” isn’t particularly empathetic. He’s already made fun of Aspinall in regards to the eye poke, but now Jones is offering his thoughts on Aspinall’s performance as a whole. According to Jones, Aspinall the few minutes that he did fight Gane demonstrated a limited fighter who struggled to hit his foe cleanly.
“Tom’s a great athlete, but I do feel like he’s a one-trick pony,” Jones said on “NoScripts Podcast” (via MMA Junkie). “I believe that his wrestling and jiu-jitsu is incredibly overrated. He has a beautiful 1-2. I got to learn a lot about his patterns in his last fight. That’s really about it. That’s the one thing that he’s setting up real nice.”
Jones continued, “He couldn’t touch Ciryl Gane at all, that’s the way I felt. I felt Gane was just getting warmed up. Gane’s hands was down, he was shaking his shoulders, bouncing around, touching him – he was so comfortable.”
The real shame of UFC 321 is that the main event was shaping up to be such a great fight. We were seeing more of Aspinall’s game than usual, and we might have even got a look at his gas tank in the later rounds if the fight continued on. Instead, Aspinall remains fairly unknowable, as his overall UFC fight time is still shockingly small for an active champion.
As for Jones, he’s currently begging for a chance to fight Alex Pereira at the UFC White House event next summer.
