Outside Source
The foul and its enforcement took center stage in the UFC 321 headliner, which ended prematurely when Tom Aspinall was unable to continue after absorbing an eye poke from Ciryl Gane at the 4:35 mark of Round 1 in their heavyweight championship bout. While Aspinall was criticized for not continuing in some circles, there has also been some focus on preventative measures for eye pokes in the future.
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During an appearance on the “Believe You Me” podcast, veteran official Herb Dean revealed that discussions are already underway regarding how to approach eye pokes in future fights.
“It’s gonna be a few meetings because a lot of ideas were floated out. We’ve more or less agreed on a way to move forward. There’s no magic bullet, one quick rule that can be changed that can affect that because we have the sport with the gloves open — because we have punching and grappling, so the fingers have to be out,” Dean said.
“So far, what we’re talking about is, we’ve made rules. So we made a rule it’s a foul to extend the fingers towards the eyes. That’s the rule we’ve already had in place. So that rule has been there, but we haven’t been enforcing it. So we’re going to move forward on that.”
Dean is also aware that having a quick trigger on point deductions for such fouls could be jarring, but it may be a necessary step toward reducing the number of infractions that occur in a fight. That includes potentially taking a point before an eye poke occurs.
“I think people would not have been used to seeing someone get a point taken, because most of the time when we take a point, it’s more as a reactive to the damaging and the unbalancing of the fight that’s been done by a foul, and that’s the only way we can think to balance it,” Dean said. “But this right here is a dangerous foul and somebody’s going to keep doing a dangerous action. We should start taking points from them doing that action before it actually happens to hurt somebody.
“The other thing about MMA is, I mean, we have a one-point sport,” Dean added. “The majority of three-round fights, what’s the score? 29-28. So you take one point, you’ve taken a majority of wins and turned it into a draw. But we’re going to have to do something, so that’s one of the things we’ve thought about that we’re going to be doing. That’s something that’s going to happen.”
Foul Guidelines Under Scrutiny
Dean said that there may also be changes in regards to what constitutes a foul.
“The other thing is writing some more guidelines for exactly what is the foul,” Dean said. “That last foul, the one with Aspinall, I think the fingers were up, right? So we can agree the fingers were up… so we might have to change that, and also, because there’s a lot of times even when you’re pawing… when you get to the end of your reach, automatic, your fingers start to come down as you’re reaching out.”
While UFC CEO Dana White has stated that the plan is to book Aspinall and Gane in a rematch as soon as possible, it will depend upon how quickly the heavyweight champion heals from the damage suffered to his eyes as a result of the foul.
This article first appeared at Recent News on Sherdog.com
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