Inside Tom Aspinall’s Scary Eye Injury That Stopped the UFC 321 Fight

Since the UFC 321 title fight on Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025, UFC fighter Tom Aspinall’s eye has been the talk of the town. Footage has been circulating showing his right eye first covered with gauze and later with a bandage.

Clearly, he suffered an eye injury, but if you didn’t catch the fight, you probably missed what actually caused it. Here’s the full rundown of what happened, how Tom’s eye is doing now, and why some people are giving him a hard time even though he took a hit to the eye, of all places.

Tom Aspinall was accidentally poked in the eye by his opponent, Ciryl Gane, during the Oct. 25, 2025, UFC 321 title fight, forcing him to stop fighting and resulting in a no-contest. Since then, Tom has shared clips from the fight showing two of Ciryl’s fingers going straight into both his right and left eyes, though the right poke was clearly more severe and sent him straight to the hospital.

In one clip after the injury, Tom described how it felt, saying, “It feels like the back of my eyeball’s hurting,” and adding, “It feels like someone touched the back of my eyeball.” He also mentioned having blurry vision in his left eye. What’s worse is that Tom says Ciryl had already been warned about eye poking earlier in the match after nearly poking him once before.

According to Tom, the ref even told Ciryl to close his fingers, but apparently, the warning didn’t stick, and there didn’t seem to be any consequences. While plenty of fans flooded Tom’s social media with kind words and well-wishes for a speedy recovery, others were quick to throw shade.

Some MMA fans accused him of faking the injury because they believed he was losing to Ciryl, while others claimed he was exaggerating how bad it really was. In one clip Tom shared of his father discussing the eye poke, a commenter wrote, “Nobody believes you, bro — you’re not fooling anyone,” while another called Tom a quitter, saying, “No matter what happens, you’ll always be a quitter.”

He's OK! While Tom was initially worried that his vision might’ve been affected by Ciryl’s accidental eye poke, calling it “way scarier than what I did to my knee,” he seems to be doing just fine now. In a photo shared to Instagram on Nov. 2, 2025, Tom posed with his dad and a few others at the Saadiyat Rotana Resort & Villas, and both his eyes appeared to have healed.

Of course, that only gave MMA fans who thought he’d exaggerated the injury more fuel for their claims, with one commenter even saying he deserves an Oscar. Seeing how divided fans were over the whole situation, former UFC champion Henry Cejudo advised that Tom just avoid the comments altogether, per ESPN, because people will always have opinions, whether they make sense or not.