Social media was flooded with accusations against Pakistan skipper Babar Azam in the past few days. Some of his pictures, videos and screenshots of alleged chats with a girl surfaced on the microblogging site Twitter.
It was claimed that Babar was involved in sexting a fellow Pakistani cricketer’s girlfriend and was honey-trapped.
Fox Cricket, one of the media partners of the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), published a story regarding the controversy on their website and shared the same on their official Twitter handle.
“Babar Azam is being accused of allegedly sexting teammate’s girlfriend after videos of voice recordings went viral online.” wrote Fox Cricket.
PCB responded to the tweet publicly and lashed out at the Fox Sports network and said that the Australian broadcast network should have avoided ‘unsubstantiated personal allegation’.
“As our media partner, you might have considered ignoring such unsubstantiated personal allegations which Babar Azam has not deemed worthy of a response,” said PCB.
After PCB’s rebuttal, Fox Cricket deleted the tweet and the published article from their website.
The parody account that made the claims and allegations on Babar also came forward and said that he built the story in a satirical way, and it wasn’t true. He further replied to PCB, “If you want to sue Fox News, reach me out in DMs. I am ready to become a witness in this case for my fellow lovely Pakistani people.”
Delete this tweet, “bf in team for sexting” story is false, I did this in a satirical way.
— Dr Nimo Yadav (@niiravmodi) January 17, 2023
If you want to sue Fox News, reach me out in DMs. I am ready to become a witness in this case for my fellow lovely Pakistani people ❤️
— Dr Nimo Yadav (@niiravmodi) January 17, 2023
Netizens celebrated the deletion of Fox Cricket’s article and lauded Pakistan cricket governing authority for their action. However, Babar didn’t pay any heed to the controversy, but the fans jumped in to support the 28-year-old and trended the hashtag #StayStronBabarAzam on Twitter.
Babar has just ended a hectic home season for the Men in Green and will next be in action in the 2023 edition of Pakistan Super League (PSL) representing Peshawar Zalmi.