Fans in need of a fix might have chanced upon a rare live cricket match streaming on YouTube on June 29—a Uva T20 league game played in Badulla, Sri Lanka. Except it was not. It was a fake match played at the Strokers Cricket Association ground, in a village about 16km from Mohali, Punjab.
The privately owned ground, located in Sawara village in Landran, sits in the middle of farmland and has hosted many corporate matches, leagues and small-time tournaments outside the purview of the Punjab Cricket Association and the Board of Control for Cricket in India. It is temporarily closed.
A police crackdown revealed that the ground had hosted the “Uva T20 league” during a lockdown. Uva is a province in Sri Lanka. The league was promoted on various apps and websites, and live-streamed on apps like Fancode, Diamond, Sky, Lotus, Tenbet and Spin. Some sites even claimed the presence of former Sri Lankan national players in the league.
As news of these matches broke, the Uva province cricket association in Sri Lanka denied any association with the league. The BCCI anti-corruption unit and the Punjab Police intervened and the league was, in anti-corruption parlance, “success- fully disrupted”. The promoter and six accomplices were arrested. The players had been wearing masks during play and were thus hard to identify.
The man behind the league, Ravinder Dandiwal, is a known “corrupter” whom an Australian daily had accused, in June, of “fixing tennis matches in Brazil, Egypt and Thailand”. The Victoria Police is investigating him.
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