Alex Pereira is still fighting the Herb Dean call.

Speaking on the Connect Cast podcast, in remarks surfaced by Heavy, the former UFC light-heavyweight and middleweight champion returned to his second-round TKO loss to Ciryl Gane and the officiating he still blames for it.

“(Gane) wore himself out badly there and couldn’t knock me out. They stopped the fight and I was still standing. I wasn’t on the ground. He was like ‘I can’t believe it. Thank God it’s over.’ You could see how heavily he was breathing,” Pereira said.

The bout he keeps returning to was UFC Freedom 250 on 14 June, the one-night card the UFC staged on the South Lawn of the White House. Gane dropped Pereira with a counter jab early in the second round and, as the Brazilian tried to recover against the fence, worked him over with punches and elbows until Dean stepped in at 1:27. The win handed Gane the interim heavyweight title, which has since been upgraded to undisputed after Tom Aspinall vacated with injury.

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Pereira’s beef with Dean

Pereira’s grievance is not really with how the fight ended. It is with what he says Gane got away with before it did.

In the days after the White House card, Pereira argued that he had specifically flagged Gane’s history of back-of-the-head strikes to Dean before the opening bell, and that several of the finishing blows landed in the illegal zone. He has also pushed hard for a rematch, telling the same outlet that Gane “does not survive the fight because he does not have heart” if given another chance.

The unified rules define the illegal zone on a fighter’s head narrowly, running from the crown down the nape of the neck. That is the ground “Big” John McCarthy, one of MMA’s most experienced referees, returned to in late June when he defended Dean on his podcast.

“Not one of those was an illegal shot. That is not an illegal elbow to the back of the head,” McCarthy said.

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A grudge Pereira won’t park

The podcast remarks are not Pereira’s first return to the subject. At UFC Belgrade in August he told The Mac Life that Dean should have stepped in to separate the legal from the illegal strikes and that he might have recovered had the rules been enforced. Four months on, the position has not softened.

Pereira’s next chance to redirect the conversation is already booked. He faces Sergei Pavlovich in a five-round co-main event at UFC 335 on 12 December at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, with a win expected to put him back in the heavyweight title picture.

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