A doctored video of a man destroying a television set and a laptop while watching a game on TV, has been widely shared on social media falsely claiming that it shows a Pakistani cricket fan reacting poorly to his team's loss to India in the ongoing T20 World Cup 2022.
BOOM found that the original video is from 2016 and it shows an agitated Turkish football fan breaking a TV set after his wife played a prank on him during a Euro 2016 match between Turkey and Croatia. The video has been doctored by swapping visuals of a football match playing on the TV set with that of the cricket match.
India scored a thrilling win against Pakistan on October 23 in Australia's Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) led by Virat Kohli's unbeaten knock of 82. The high-stakes T20 world cup match between two arch-rivals ended in a nail-biting finish.
Former Indian cricketer Virender Sehwag posted the video and wrote, "Relax neighbour, it's only a game. We are bursting crackers here for Diwali and you are unnecessarily smashing a TV. No man, what has the TV done wrong?"
Click here to view the post.
Former Indian spinner Harbhajan Singh also amplified the same claim by quote tweeting his once teammate Sehwag's tweet.
Click here to view the post.
Mainstream news outlets such as India Today, NDTV Hindi, Times Now, ABP News, Republic, Dainik Jagran, Punjab Kesari, sports outlet Sportskeeda also published their story based on Sehwag's tweet. The outlets, however, did not mention about the original video relying solely on Sehwag's tweet.
Fact Check
BOOM broke the video into key-frames while looking for news reports about the incident and a reverse image search on TinEye led us to a Daily Mail news report from June 16, 2016 carrying the original video.
The report states, "This is the moment an enraged football fan smashes his TV and snaps his laptop in half after his wife plays a trick on him during a Euro 2016 match. The man, who has been identified as Izzet Salti, tuned in to watch his country Turkey play Croatia in their first game of the competition being held in France."
The article further adds that the person's wife revealed she had an app installed on her smartphone. The app provided her access to control the television using which she played a prank on her husband. It also helped her to turn off the TV repeatedly during the football match, leaving Izzet increasingly angry.
A comparison between the viral video and a scene from the original video can be seen below.
As per the Daily Mail, "The video concludes with Izzet receiving a telling off from his other half - and to add insult to injury, Turkey went on to lose the game 1-0."
The incident was also covered by several other news outlets in 2016. One such report by Daily Express can be read here.
A longer version of the video was uploaded on the YouTube channel of Turkish news outlet De Jonge Turken on June 15, 2016.