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Former UFC two-weight champion Daniel Cormier shared his thoughts on redesigning the current MMA gloves, stating that no matter how much they are redesigned, fighters will always have problems with them.
Recall that last weekend, the main fight of the UFC Fight Night 187 tournament between Leon Edwards and Belal Muhmad was declared invalid when a fighter from Great Britain accidentally hit his opponent in the eye. The incident was the spark that sparked a heated debate over a redesign of the gloves.
Speaking to Ariel Helwani on ESPN, Cormier explained why the new gloves with a potential curve design won’t be as effective in curbing eye pokes as some analysts seem to think.
“A lot of times when you poke eyes, you are trying to grab. If your fingers aren’t allowed to open or straighten, I think that you could eliminate some of the eye-poking but the reality is, there’s gonna be issues with the gloves being curved if we go forward. My thing is this, you’re never gonna find something that works perfectly. There’s gonna be issues with everything and I don’t know what it’s gonna take in order to stop eye-poking. I believe eye pokes will still happen, maybe not as frequently but they will still happen,” Daniel Cormier said (via MMAFighting.com).
“Eye pokes happen just about every fight. The big one that just happened with Belal (Muhammad) — when was the last time a big one like that happened where it was so damaging?”
Cormier himself has been at the center of controversy with eye pokes, most notably during his trilogy with Stipe Miocic, so hearing his thoughts on new gloves is very revealing. And while Cormier might be right that eye pokes are just a part of the sport and we need to live with them, there has to be a better glove out there that will lessen the prevalence of them.