Ciryl Gane may have secured a dominant statement victory over Alex Pereira, but the win was far from controversy-free. The French heavyweight stopped the Brazilian in the second round after dropping him and forcing the referee to step in. Yet as the action unfolded at the White House on Sunday, reigning heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall was watching closely live and shared his thoughts on YouTube.

“He looked good,” Aspinall said. “I have to watch that again. It looked like there [were] a lot of illegal elbows going on, illegal punches, but generally, he looked good. [Pereira] just didn’t really seem to get going, did he? He just looked a bit stiff and reserved from the beginning. I don’t know if he was trying to feel his way into the fight or what, but he just never seemed to … he looked slow, but he’s not a particularly fast light heavyweight.”

There was a reason Alex Pereira was slow. Going from light heavyweight to heavyweight means gaining 50 pounds. While many thought this weight gain would translate into more power for the already heavy-handed Pereira, it made him slower. Things were only made worse by Gane, who is much lighter on his feet despite being a heavyweight. 

And as for the illegal blows to the back of Alex Pereira’s head, those came during the finishing sequence of the fight. Despite the blatant foul, referee Herb Dean never intervened to stop the fight from moving forward. Instead, Dean let the fight unfold naturally, leading to the French heavyweight winning the interim heavyweight title. 

In the aftermath, ‘Bon Gamin’ immediately called out Tom Aspinall for a fight in Paris around September. Tom Aspinall, who wasn’t invited to the event, agreed to the terms of the fight quickly. 

“Paris in September,” Aspinall added. “I’ll do that. Yeah, I’ll do that. Let me know. I don’t mind. I’ll go to Paris. Let me know.”

With both fighters in agreement, the rematch has suddenly become the biggest fight in the UFC. And when it happens, much like in the Pereira fight, Aspinall would be wary about the illegal punches from Ciryl Gane, especially since he himself had experienced even worse fouls at the hands of the new interim heavyweight champion last year. 

The pair squared off at UFC 321 in October last year. While Ciryl Gane appeared to be gaining the upper hand against Tom Aspinall, the fight was marred by multiple eye pokes from the Frenchman. The repeated fouls ultimately left Aspinall unable to continue, forcing the bout to be ruled a no-contest. Aspinall has had multiple surgeries since then. 

Besides Aspinall, others, including Josh Hokit, Tom Lawlor, and Herbert Burns, spoke about the shots to the back of the head. However, no one denied that the Frenchman had the upper hand and would have won the fight. In the meantime, however, Sean O’Malley has leaked a specific conversation between Pereira and the referee. 

Sean O’Malley sheds light on the conversation backstage

According to the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, the referee is supposed to speak to the fighters backstage about the rules of the fight before the action begins. Referee Herb Dean appears to have followed that point when he spoke to Pereira. And during this, Sean O’Malley, who defeated Aiemann Zahabi on the same card, was close by. 

“You know what’s funny, in the rules meeting when Pereira was talking to the ref, they were having the translator go over [the] back of the head,” O’Malley said. “Because I remember when Gane finished [Junior dos Santos] and elbowing him in the back of the head.” 

Gane defeated former heavyweight champion Junior dos Santos via TKO at 2:34 of the second round on December 12, 2020, at UFC 256 in Las Vegas. Even in that fight, the finishing elbow strike landed illegally to the back of his head. Referee Jerin Valel deemed the strike legal, and the fight was called. 

It was reviewed and upheld by the commentary team, UFC brass, and subsequently the Nevada Athletic Commission (NSAC), which rejected an official appeal filed by dos Santos’ team. 

That said, most of the time, if illegal blows aren’t stopped during the fight, they’ll likely be overlooked afterward. But in Alex Pereira’s case, he was losing the fight with or without the illegal shots to the back of the head.