It is difficult to overstate the popularity of cricket in India, but if you caught the livestream of the recent Indian Premier League match between the Maharashtra Rangers and Palanpur Sports Kings, you might have an idea. The floodlit game was treated like a wild carnival by its spectators, with a mad hullabaloo of cheering and chanting and horn-blowing refusing to let up for the match’s entire three-hour duration. The whole thing was nothing less than a perfect microcosm of the Indian cricket scene.
Except there’s just one problem. The match wasn’t real. Neither the Maharashtra Rangers nor the Palanpur Sports Kings actually exist. If you saw the livestream, then you were actually just watching a group of laborers and farm boys playacting on a scrap of cleared farmland in the remote village of Molipur, about 400 miles north of Mumbai. The score had been decided ahead of time. The crowd sounds were piped in from the Internet. The entire thing was an impressively elaborate scam, designed solely to cheat a handful of Russian gamblers out of their money.
