(‘This is my hammer. I call her Sheila. You do not want to make Sheila angry.’)

Knees to the groin aside, Alistair Overeem isn’t buying Mirko “Cro Cop” Filipovic‘s claims that he could not continue during last night’s Dream.6 bout. Cro Cop’s anguish looked pretty genuine, and Overeem’s knees seemed intent on finding his testicles, but Fighters Only reports that the Dutchman thinks dude was faking it in order to get out of a beating:

“Tonight I was kicking his ass, I destroyed him. …The first knee was in the crotch but the second was not. CroCop just didn’t want to fight anymore.”

“I think he underestimated me, but if he wants to fight again, I’ll fight him again. I’d like to finish him.”

Overeem was dominating the fight. That much seems apparent, though Cro Cop would have us believe that he was just biding his time and waiting for the right moment to stop getting his ass kicked.

But whatever you think of Cro Cop and his ethical code, that knee strike was clearly in the groin neighborhood. A cursory examination of the video evidence proves that much. Even if Overeem feels that he didn’t get him right on the buttons, as it were, he’s got to concede that Cro Cop might have been just a little extra sensitive in the testicular region at that point in the fight, seeing as how he’d already been nailed there. Nobody likes to see a fight end like that, especially the guy who leaves the ring with one of his testicles inside his body, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.