[autotag]Jimmy Crute[/autotag] saw his momentum come to a halt in the most unfortunate way.
In his biggest opportunity to date, Crute (12-2 MMA, 4-2 UFC) drew former light heavyweight title challenger [autotag]Anthony Smith[/autotag] this past weekend at UFC 261, but his fight was stopped in a situation out of his control.
Smith (35-16 MMA, 10-6 UFC) threw an array of leg kicks early, landing a hard one midway through Round 1, which dropped Crute. The 25-year-old Aussie was visibly hurt, forcing him to shoot right for the takedown, which he got. He kept Smith down for the remainder of the round, but when he tried to get up to walk back to his corner, his leg gave out.
The sight of his ankle rolling prompted doctors to wave the fight off, much to the chagrin of Crute. As a result, he lost by first-round TKO due to a doctor’s stoppage, but Crute is adamant that he could have continued fighting.
“I was definitely winning that first round,” Crute told Submission Radio. “I don’t feel like they should have stopped the fight for what they did, but it is what is. Like, what can I do about it? But I do feel better after watching it back. It was close, and as soon as the injury happened, I started dominating. So, it makes me feel a bit better about the whole situation. I know they shouldn’t have stopped it, and if they didn’t stop it I would have gone out and dominated in the second round.”
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Crute explains that while he couldn’t feel his leg after getting hit in the perineal nerve, it’s a situation that’s happened before in fights. So even after he was stumbling to his stool, he expected to go out for Round 2.
“I had no idea they weren’t going to let me go,” Crute said. “Even when I stood up and I was limping, (there have) been times before where people have hurt their leg and limped around and come good, and they’ve given them the benefit of the doubt. I think they should have. I think they should have let me go out. I definitely wanted to. I feel like if I would have gone out in the second, I would have put him away. But in terms of what I felt straight away when I got him to the ground, yeah, there was a bit of urgency to finish him.
“But there’s urgency to finish him anyway. I wanted to get him out of there because I couldn’t feel my leg obviously. And then when I got on top of him, I was just surprised how easy he was to control and how easy he was to hit. I think I landed 25 ground-and-pound strikes in a row, and I definitely had a massive advantage on the ground. So yeah, there was urgency to finish just because I didn’t want to go into the second with a cooked leg. But I was very prepared to do that if I needed to.”
Currently fulfilling his mandatory two-week quarantine back home in Australia, Crute hasn’t received an exact diagnosis of his injury. It’ll be a while before he gets to find out.
“I think I did a bit of damage to my LCL,” Crute said. “I think that’s what they said it looked like when I fell. But it’s just gutting because I didn’t get the opportunity to go out on my own terms.”
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