French cricket scandal: Women's national team disbands

And France is not known for playing cricket. Yet in the last few years, it’s women’s team has participated in official tournaments organized by the global governing body. Now, in November, a France 24 investigation raised doubts over the country’s eligibility to take part. And now the women’s team has collapsed. Peter O’Brien, tell us more. What is this? Is this a phantom team? Are these real players? These are real, real players Shown us? Certainly. So as you said in November, our investigation revealed that France Crickets the governing body for cricket in France which is has the right to manage the the sport in the country and to have national teams given to it by the ministry via another organization. But they are the official governing body in France. Now we are investigation found that they were allegedly faking matches in order to get more money from the international governing body, the ICC. And another benefit for having figures how do you fake a match? Sorry. There would be matches planned with the women’s Second Division and these matches would come to pass. There would be no evidence of these matches actually taking place. I went with Eloise Melon, our journalist, video journalist, and we’ve actually recorded some matches taking place. There were men’s matches happening instead of women’s matches which was supposed to be taking place. There was also photographic evidence from other matches and the and the latest report out today has yet more evidence of alleged fake matches. Now this also allows France cricket to put it’s women’s national team into ICC tournaments, official officially recognised tournaments, which I’m told they’re not eligible to do so because they don’t actually have that many women’s teams playing cricket in France. How many do we know? So from what I was able to gather, there are three women’s teams that regularly compete and have enough women to regularly compete, perhaps four. No more than that. Nevertheless, on Saturday, this Saturday, the season will start anew, with again a tournament including ten women’s teams. There are serious doubts over whether this tournament will be able to take place. The ICC has told Allison Mitchell of the BBC Stumped Podcast that they’ve looked into the allegations and that there’s nothing to do about it. Essentially that they consider the affair closed, but as you’ll see in the report out today, the women’s national team has collapsed because seventeen of the players called for further investigation which which essentially has not come to pass from the ICC and they’ve basically been punished without explanation as a result. I I didn’t even know that France played cricket. I didn’t even know that it was a thing in France. Yes, well, not many people do, certainly not many French people. They think it’s polo, they think it’s croquet. But it does happen in France. It happens in another over 90 Associate ICT members around the world. And there are millions and millions of dollars disbursed annually to these smaller nations. So it is not just a question of France, but it’s a question of global cricket as well. Shona, now where we can find your report? Tell us about your report that you’ve made. It’s out on the website. You can find it right now on france24.com. Thank you so much, Peter O’Brien there. Fascinating story about French cricket. I didn’t even know it existed. Stay tuned. There’s more news coming up on France 24. Stay with us.