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Sean O’Malley did not have the same stance when he was the one involved in an eye-poke controversy. The talk of the combat sports town remains the disastrous conclusion to last Saturday’s UFC 321 pay-per-view in Abu Dhabi. The main event ended with Ciryl Gane poking Tom Aspinall in the eye, resulting in their undisputed heavyweight title fight being ruled a no contest. Since then, the MMA world has been split. Some have berated the Frenchman for committing the severe foul, while others continue to question whether the Englishman could have continued. TJ Dillashaw accused Aspinall of quitting, but another former UFC bantamweight champion had a different view. “You’re the UFC heavyweight champion of the world and you just got poked in the eye very bad, you’re fighting a very dangerous kickboxer,” O’Malley said on his YouTube channel. “To question Tom’s toughness is insane. “I’ve been poked in the eye before…you can’t see, it’s scary. You don’t know if that’s going to come back. You don’t know if you’re going to see again. It’s really a possibility that you get poked in the eye and can’t see ever again, let alone now you’re trying to fight this guy. “It’s unfortunate but you just can’t question Tom’s toughness on that,” he added. But ‘Suga’ did not give one of his opponents the same benefit of the doubt back in 2022… Sean O’Malley said he ‘finished’ Pedro Munhoz after eye poke led to UFC 276 no contest Sean O’Malley was on a different side of an eye-poke controversy to Aspinall three years ago, when he shared the cage with Pedro Munhoz at UFC 276. In what marked his first test against top-10 opposition, the American was left exiting the cage without a victory after O’Malley’s foul left Munhoz unable to continue in round two. Unlike in the case of Aspinall, O’Malley did question his rival’s toughness. “100 percent, that’s what’s going on in my mind,” O’Malley said backstage after the fight when asked if Munhoz took the easy way out. “I was piecing him up, I didn’t get hit once. … I was dominating that fight. “It didn’t feel like it was bad,” he added regarding the poke itself. “I thought we were going to be fighting in 20 seconds, I didn’t feel like the fight was going to be stopped. “I was dominating that fight, I checked every one of his leg kicks, I could feel his shins cracking. Every time he would throw a kick, I would check it and I could tell it hurt him. I didn’t get hit one time. “I do feel like I won the fight. … I really believe that was best case scenario for Pedro.” Tom Aspinall may have suffered the same damage at UFC 321 as Pedro Munhoz Aspinall’s father claimed his vision remains compromised, and it was a similar case for Munhoz back in 2022. The Brazilian came out and defended himself against O’Malley’s suggestion that he quit and could have continued fighting. Revealing the damage, Munhoz said he suffered a scratched cornea as a result of the American’s foul, as detailed in a medical report after hospital tests. Speaking on a recent episode of The Ariel Helwani Show, Brian Sutterer MD listed that as something Aspinall could also be dealing with while assessing the heavyweight champion’s return timeline. “If it’s just a corneal abrasion, typically within a few days or a week they’re feeling quite a bit better,” Sutterer said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be 100 percent resolved yet but assuming they re-evaluate and there’s no damage to the retina, there’s no damage to the globe, and his visual acuity comes back, I would expect him to be fine in a matter of weeks and be back ready to fight assuming there’s nothing else that they find.”
