Quote Originally Posted by ryanman View Post
Quote Originally Posted by JazMerkin View Post
It definitely looks dodgy. I mean in his defence I will say that I've fractured my hand & broken my nose in the ring & the adrenaline gets you through it, but the time that I pulled a muscle in my lower back (thankfully only in sparring) I was completely unable to do anything.

But, the issue is that if it was that bad then I don't know how he passed tests & how he trained through it. The fact it got mentioned in advance is dodge. Add in the betting thing & this looks very, very wrong. I agree with Ed, that was a farce.
That's the thing. This looks too wrong now. I was joking about Cook taking a dive before but really hoped it wouldn't happen.

The only 'out' I see is that all the money piled in on Burns via KO due to insider knowledge that there was no way Cook was able to go the distance due to his back rather than a dive as such.
I'm normally the last to accuse a fighter of something like this. I mentioned Liston, Seldon & Briggs above, but in all those cases I think there's reason to believe that they simply got blasted (Liston from another angle did appear to get hit hard & did try to carry on, Seldon was shit & Briggs was reportedly having the same things happening every day in sparring).

Unfortunately here, the way he seemed to almost turn his back into it, just gives me have the gut feeling that he threw it. I really hope I'm wrong.