Photo of Dean Shiels as a Kilmarnock player: Rob Casey/ Getty Images

Scottish second-tier club Falkirk issued a club statement on Tuesday apologizing and condemning the behavior of “a small number of individuals” at that afternoon’s match against Dunfermline. During the match, some Falkirk supporters threw fake eyeballs at Dunfermline’s Dean Shiels, who was blinded in his right eye when he was eight years old, and had surgery to remove the eye in 2006.


Shiels, who’s made 14 caps with Northern Ireland, has had to deal with this a lot throughout his career, and not just from fans. Falkirk, specifically, has now has a history of this sort of thing, and the fake eyeballs were likely a response to what happened in the previous Dunfermline game. Two Falkirk players are currently still serving suspensions from their last meeting with Dunfermline, when they taunted Shiels about his eye.

Falkirk said that they will be giving disability awareness training to all its staff and players, and that they’re working with Dunfermline to identify the fans responsible, who the club will “look to take action against.”