UFC star Darren Till shows off gruesome eye injury and hints he was given shiner by team-mate during sparring

UFC middleweight Darren Till suffered a gruesome eye injury during training camp for his return to the octagon.

The Liverpudlian is just weeks away from his UFC 282 clash with surging South African Dricus Du Plessis in Las Vegas.

MMA in Thailand for his first outing of the year.

And the hard training has left him with a stomach-churning injury to his left eye.

The Gorilla shared a snap of his left eyeball looking completely bloodshot and bruised to his Instagram page last weekend.

His accompanying caption for the snap – which was included in a series of post-training photos – read: “Solid days work today with the boys.”

Till’s legion of fans quickly expressed their concerns, with one saying: “Second pic we needed a warning.”

Another said: “What happened [to] your eye?”

And another said: “Is it worth losing an eye, Darren?”

One chimed in: “New injury for 282?”

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Till’s clash with South African slugger Du Plessis will be his first outing in over a year.

The Team Kaobon standout hasn’t set foot inside the cage since his third-round submission defeat to Derek Brunson last September.

That defeat was preceded by a closely-contested clash with former middleweight king Robert Whittaker, which he lost via decision.

Since beating Stephen Thompson at UFC Liverpool in May 2018, Till has gone 1-4 in his last five – with the first of those losses being a second-round submission defeat to former welterweight champion Tyron Woodley.

Till’s sole victory in that run was a split-decision win over Kelvin Gastelum at UFC 244, a triumph Du Plessis reckons gave the Scouser a false sense of confidence at middleweight.

He told The AllStar: “His first fight, I think he fought Kelvin Gastelum as his first middleweight. Gastelum is definitely not a middleweight, in my opinion.

“He’s a very small middleweight… I think that gave Darren Till almost a false confidence that this move to middleweight — ‘See I told you, now I’m bigger and stronger.’ But he fought a very small middleweight, who’s also actually a welterweight.

“Then he started fighting the big boys at middleweight and things started to go a little south.

“The way he approached going to middleweight, he didn’t put on the good weight.

“We saw him in his last few fights — definitely not in shape, not the shape we know Darren Till to be in. He gassed out quick, got overpowered.”