Pak-India Cricket – 6th loss or 6th fix?

Conspiracy theories always grip Pakistan-India cricket matches, and it is not surprising that claims that the match was fixed have surfaced once more. On Sunday, a man tweeted the results of the ICC Cricket World Cup match between the two archrivals much earlier than the match had ended.

During the much-awaited match between India and Pakistan played at the Adelaide Oval India beat Pakistan by 76 runs, and kept their record of never being beaten by Pakistan during a world cup match.

The Indian side won the toss and went on to score 300 runs after opting to bat first. They played the full 50 overs and lost seven wickets. On the other hand, Pakistan was all out at 224 during the 47th over.

The match ended late in the afternoon as per Pakistan Standard Time. However, surprisingly a person named Aslam Khan Tanoli, at around 12:35am, tweeted that India would score 300 runs while Pakistan would be all out at 220.

The person was so sure in his claim that he asked the viewers to copy his tweet and accept his challenge.

We know that the Pakistan vs. India Match concluded at around 4:30pm, then how was it possible for Tanoli to have so accurately predicted the outcome of the match five hours ahead of closing time?

This tweet is currently making rounds on Facebook and Twitter, along with claims that the match was fixed. Well it could be — who knows — but not because this person predicted the results of the game well ahead of the outcome.

It is pertinent to mention here that Twitter does not allow its users to change the timestamp of a tweet. Even when you change the time zone or try to tweak the settings, changing the time is simply impossible.

So technically speaking, Tanoi tweeted exactly at 12:35am. Of course Tanoli does not have a time machine either. All he has is a neat little trick. What is interesting is not the prediction but the fact that Tanoli tweeted hundreds of other tweets, with all sorts of probable scenarios along with this one. Eventually, when the match was over he deleted irrelevant or incorrect tweets and left the one that had matched the results.

This is not something new to the man. During July of last year, something similar happened when an account accurately predicted the outcome of the FIFA World Cup even before the match had begun.

A twitter handle called “Reign of Football” had tweeted all possible scenarios ahead of the FIFA World Cup Finals, and then deleted all of the incorrect outcomes.

Earlier a couple of weeks ago, the former Pakistan cricket team captain Aamir Sohail had hinted at purported fixing of India Pakistan world cup matches.

In reply to question raised by a reporter about Pakistan losing all their world cup matches against India, Sohail said that results of such matches are decided not in the ground but off the ground.