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How a star-studded Kashmir cricket league bombed as organisers fled
Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – Aasif Manzoor, a 32-year-old cricketer from Anantnag, a district in the south of Indian-administered Kashmir, was readying himself on Saturday morning to play a match in a star-studded tournament.
Retired global stars, local cricket icons and up-and-coming players were all part of the Indian Heaven Premier League (IHPL), which organisers had billed as a spectacle that they promised would grip the troubled region and draw large crowds.
Instead, Manzoor found himself huddled with his teammates in the corridors of the Radisson, a five-star hotel overlooking the Jhelum River in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir’s biggest city, which was hosting the series.
Their hotel bookings had been arranged by the Yuva Society, a private group based in India’s northern state of Punjab, which had also organised the tournament. “The staff was refusing to let us check out,” Manzoor told Al Jazeera.
The reason? The organisers had vanished the night before, allegedly after running out of money midway through the tournament.
As the hotel bills mounted and ran into millions of rupees, dozens of players like Manzoor found themselves trapped. Scoring runs and taking wickets wasn’t on their minds any more. Getting out of the hotel was.
They eventually were able to leave, but the rest of the tournament was scrapped.
The embarrassing debacle has raised questions about the event’s planning and the role of the region’s administrators. But to many, the episode is also the latest example of the pitfalls of attempts by the Indian government and corporate entities backed by it to portray a sense of “normalcy” in Kashmir, six years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government scrapped the region’s semi autonomous special status.
“It was a shocking experience for us,” Manzoor said.
The fortnight-long cricket tournament kicked off on October 25 in chilly Srinagar as winter set in. The competition had eight teams, including 32 former international cricketers, with the bulk of the rest of the players from Kashmir.
Major global stars included former West Indies champion batsman Chris Gayle, ex-Sri Lankan all-rounder Thisara Perera, New Zealand batsman Jesse Ryder, South African Richard Levi and Omani player Ayab Khan.
“For the first time, we will have international cricket superstars like Chris Gayle playing for a local Kashmiri team,” Nuzhat Gul, who heads the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council, said at the beginning of the tournament.
“The motive for organising such tournaments was to engage the young positively,” she said, adding that the government had offered infrastructure, publicity and logistical assistance to the organisers.
The tournament was supposed to conclude on Friday [8th November 2025].
But officials who spoke to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity said the event ran into “sponsorship difficulties”. In other words, sponsors didn’t pay up as they had promised to. That challenge was amplified once it became clear that only a trickle of local Kashmiris was coming to watch the matches at the Bakshi Stadium, a sprawling sports facility in the middle of Srinagar.
Things came to a head when the organisers packed up and left in the middle of the night last Friday, leaving players haggling with hotels over unpaid room rents.
Trapped at the Radisson, Manzoor said he tried calling the organisers. But no one picked up or returned his calls.
“It took a while to understand what was going on.”
Eventually, Manzoor said, a senior member from the English Cricket Board, Melissa Juniper, who was also in Srinagar for the event, rang up the British high commission in New Delhi, whose officials spoke to the hotel staff.
“They worked out something, and the players were allowed to check out, including myself,” he added. Juniper, he said, stayed back at the hotel while British officials figured out how to clear the dues.
The British high commission did not return queries from Al Jazeera on its reported mediation with the hotel staff in Srinagar on behalf of the players. But on Wednesday, Mushtaq Chaya, owner of the Radisson in Srinagar, told reporters that the organisers had defaulted on payments of more than 5 million rupees ($57,531).
Meanwhile, FanCode, a cricket streaming app, has since Saturday listed the remaining matches of the competition as “abandoned”.
According to Manzoor, players had started realising that there was something wrong with the event even before the organisers packed up and left.
“Local players were demanding that the organisers must first sign a contract with them before they can proceed to play. They were assuring us that it would happen. But it did not,” Manzoor said. “Then suddenly, they left without anyone knowing about it. We did not expect it to end this way.”
Kashmiri authorities are now facing mounting questions from locals: How was the event given a go-ahead without background checks on the organisers? And did the tournament go through the rigorous scrutiny any event in Kashmir is usually subject to in a region known for sweeping restrictions and surveillance?
Police in Kashmir have announced an investigation as regional sports authorities — including Gul of the Jammu and Kashmir Sports Council — are now distancing themselves from the organisers.
“If they did this, the law would take its own course,” said Satish Sharma, the minister for youth services and sports in Kashmir. “An inquiry has started, and action will follow. Police have taken up the case.”
Al Jazeera tried to reach the Yuva Society but has not received any response. Meanwhile, the organisation’s website appears to be down since the debacle. Details about the organisers are no longer available on the portal.
All it still has is a single message flashing on the screen: “Get ready, something cool is coming!”
For a while, it did seem like something “cool” could be coming to Kashmir.
Social media visuals for the event show Gayle, who was one of international cricket’s biggest draws for two decades, taking heavy steps on the damp turf in the Srinagar stadium as his hair swung under a black bandana tied around his forehead.
In most shots, the seats around the venue during matches were sparsely occupied. But in one scene, a small crowd of young fans is jumping with jubilation as heavily armed members of the Indian paramilitary forces surround them.
“There was a lot of anticipation for this tournament,” Parvez Rasool, arguably Kashmir’s best-known cricketer, told Al Jazeera. “That local Kashmiri cricketers would share the same dressing room as these megastars was a major thing in itself.”
Rasool was also to play in the tournament. He rose to stardom in 2013 after briefly playing for the Indian cricket team – the first Kashmiri to do so. His inclusion in the national team was lauded by the Indian media and politicians as an example of the “mainstreaming” of Kashmiris at a time when the region was in turmoil after a crackdown on protesters. Since the late 1980s, Kashmir has been in the throes of an armed rebellion with separatists seeking independence from India.
Rasool said his payments have not been settled by organisers so far. “The people who approached me to take part are big names in Indian cricket, so I consented,” he said, without naming the individuals he was referring to.
“I don’t agree with the allegations that the event was organised in bad faith, but it seems that it may not have been properly planned. The sponsors have reportedly failed to turn up, and the audience wasn’t even 5 percent of what was expected,” he added.
Another Kashmiri cricketer who was part of the trials before the main tournament was held, said a lot of his peers were already disappointed with the league because of the absence of any formal contracts or payments.
“They took a fee of $14 from bowlers and batsmen and of $20 from all-rounders who took part in the trials,” the 24-year-old said on condition of anonymity because he feared repercussions for his comments.
“Everything seemed suspicious from the very beginning. Thisara Perera, the Sri Lankan star, played with us. It was embarrassing that even his uniform wasn’t tailored to his size. The size of his sportswear was 46 inches, but they offered him 42,” the Kashmiri player said, chuckling.
While some sports enthusiasts in Kashmir said it was the comparatively high price of the tickets at $4 each that kept spectators away, others blamed the timing of the event, which coincided with the annual apple harvest. As a result, many locals were busy tending to their orchards. Apples provide a livelihood for nearly half the region’s eight million people.
“Some matches lasted from 10am until 5 in the evening,” said a video journalist who filmed the tournament for his Instagram page. He spoke on condition of anonymity. “Obviously, who would turn up in the middle of the harvest?”
But to some analysts, the tournament’s collapse is also emblematic of the attempts by Modi’s government and local authorities to portray a sense of normalcy in Kashmir.
Critics argued that such state-backed events aim to depoliticise Kashmir’s realities even as surveillance tightens, dissent is curbed and political representation remains suspended.
In 2019, Modi’s government annulled Kashmir’s special status and downgraded the region into a federally controlled territory during a crackdown on journalists, human rights campaigners and opposition politicians.
Omar Abdullah, who returned as Kashmir’s chief minister during last year’s polls, has been pleading in vain with New Delhi to reinstate Kashmir’s pre-2019 powers.
Apoorvanand, a Hindi professor at the University of Delhi who writes literary and cultural criticism, told Al Jazeera that the cricket tournament fit a broader pattern.
“It’s been a part of Modi’s political repertoire right from 2014 to organise these celebrations to give an appearance of cheerfulness so that his critics don’t question him,” Apoorvanand, who goes by a single name, said, referring to the year Modi became India’s prime minister.
Similar events held in Kashmir in the past have come under criticism, such as last month when a popular New Delhi-headquartered television news channel organised a concert featuring popular Indian performer Sonu Nigam.
The concert was boycotted by many Kashmiris, citing the performer’s past tweets in which he had criticised the practice of loudspeakers being used for the Islamic call to prayer.
“The principal addressees of these events are Modi’s voters across what is known as the country’s Hindi-speaking belt. The message that his administration wants to telegraph is that everything is hunky-dory in the Kashmir Valley,” Apoorvanand said.
“It is to give them a sense of ownership over the region.”
Kashmiri researchers who have been observing the conflict for decades said that while large events such as the cricket competition are by themselves harmless, any effort to use them to send broader messages about the current state of Kashmir is problematic.
“If these events are meant to suggest Kashmir is ‘normal’, then what better way to demonstrate [that] than withdrawing the military forces, the draconian laws and the suppression of dissent?” said Mohamad Junaid, an associate professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the United States.
If the Modi government “wants the world to see ‘normalcy’,” he said, “India could begin by releasing thousands of Kashmiri political prisoners from jails.”
[Aljazeera]
The United States military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) said its forces conducted “self-defence” strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island and “defeated multiple” Iranian missiles and drones as civilian vessels and regional allies Kuwait and Bahrain came under attack.
Kuwait’s military said air defence systems intercepted incoming drones and missiles, while Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said warning sirens were activated. Earlier, Iranian media reported that explosions were heard in the vicinity of Qeshm Island.
[Aljazeera]
In January 2024, the publication Axios reported that the United States president at the time, Joe Biden, was “running out of patience” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza had been raging for months by that point, and Biden was facing public backlash over US support for the conflict.
The assault would continue for the rest of Biden’s term and bleed into the first 10 months of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Since then, media outlets have continued to publish anonymous accounts of rifts and “frustrating” calls between Trump and the Israeli prime minister. But US support for its Middle East ally has never wavered.
Another anonymously sourced report about a furious, expletive-laden call between US and Israeli leaders came out this week, and it spread rapidly across international media.
Axios reported on Monday that Trump called Netanyahu “f***ing crazy” and berated him over Israel’s escalation in Lebanon.
Around the same time, an Israeli attack killed six people, including two children, in the southern Lebanese town of al-Marwaniyah.
Experts say that despite leaks of feuds and harsh words between US leaders and Netanyahu, policies are ultimately what matters, and they have changed very little.
Ryan Costello, the policy director at the National Iranian American Council Action (NIAC), said political observers have grown to “mock” reports of closed-door anger from US presidents against Netanyahu.
“What’s really important is what actually happens in practice,” Costello told Al Jazeera.
Though there are reports of Trump giving Netanyahu a dressing-down, Isabelle Hayslip, an advocacy manager at the US-based rights group DAWN, said that US policy remains aligned with Israeli interests.
“Single-source reporting of Trump as a strongman who picks up the phone and yells at Netanyahu for undermining US policy is contradicted by the actual policy outcomes where Netanyahu gets exactly what he wants,” Hayslip told Al Jazeera.
“Trump has no final say over Israeli actions. Like his predecessors, the president has proved completely unable to prioritise American interests, instead catering to Israel’s expansionist whims.”
The latest report comes as Trump faces increasing pressure from his Democratic rivals and segments of his base over his handling of the war on Iran, which he launched jointly with Netanyahu on February 28.
The conflict, which saw Iran close the Strait of Hormuz, has sent gasoline prices soaring in the US and fuelled inflation.
Critics have accused Trump of allowing Israel to drag the US into a war that does not advance Washington’s priorities.
With negotiations to end the war stagnating, Israel’s escalation in Lebanon and its threat to bomb Beirut risks derailing the fragile truce that came into effect in April.
Iranian officials have suggested that they cut off contact with the US over the Israeli attacks in Lebanon.
Before the Axios report, Trump announced he had spoken to Netanyahu and an unidentified Hezbollah representative, and both sides agreed that “all shooting will stop”.
But Netanyahu was quick to assert that the Israeli military “will continue to operate as planned in southern Lebanon”, where it is deepening its invasion and turning entire towns into rubble.
Advocates say Israeli atrocities in Lebanon and across the region could not have happened without US backing.
Since the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, the US has provided Israel with nearly $25bn in military aid, helped fend off retaliatory Iranian attacks against the country and vetoed several ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.
Nonetheless, anonymous accounts that the US president is angry at Netanyahu have become a regular feature in the media.
Such reports are attributed to US officials, but it is unclear how leaks with a similar message on the same topic have continued across two administrations from different political parties.
Publicly, aides of both Biden and Trump have largely refrained from criticising Israel.
Trump has regularly praised the Israeli prime minister, arguing on more than one occasion that Israel would have ceased to exist without Netanyahu’s leadership.
In December, the US president also called the Israeli prime minister a “hero” during a meeting in Florida.
“We’re with you, and we’ll continue to be with you,” Trump told Netanyahu.
Two weeks earlier, Axios reported that the White House had “scolded” Netanyahu over Israel’s ceasefire violations in Gaza.
“The White House message to Netanyahu was: ‘If you want to ruin your reputation and show that you don’t abide by agreements, be our guest, but we won’t allow you to ruin President Trump’s reputation after he brokered the deal in Gaza,” the publication quoted a US official as saying.
Few people know the exact content of high-level calls at the White House. Sometimes, top officials, including members of the National Security Council, sit in on conversations between the president and world leaders after briefings.
Negar Mortazavi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, a research nonprofit, said the leak about the tense call between Trump and Netanyahu may be aimed at making Trump look tough on Israel to quell outrage over the war.
“It could be sort of a way of moderating the anger or the blame at the US for continuing this unpopular, illegal, unnecessary war,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.
She added that the message it sends is, “Look, we’re very angry at Israel. We yell at them. We call them names.”
But Mortazavi stressed that policy is more important than rhetoric: “Does that change the facts on the ground?”
For his part, Costello argued that the leak was likely directed at Iran.
“I see this one primarily as a signal to the Iranians that Trump is serious, and he wants to insulate what’s happening in Lebanon and Israel’s attacks from the Iran negotiations,” Costello said.
“It remains to be seen the extent to which that excoriation has actually led to a change in Israel’s policies, and I think there is a strong incentive for continued defiance from Netanyahu.”
Axios, meanwhile, has defended its coverage.
“We stand by our reporting, which by the way noted ‘Trump and Netanyahu have had several tense calls in the past but have still coordinated closely on Iran and other issues,’” Jake Wilkins, a spokesperson for the publication, told Al Jazeera in an email.
Mortazavi warned that all sides of the war on Iran are trying to influence public perceptions of the conflict.
She pointed to recent reports that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had resigned, a rumour that was promptly denied by his office.
“This is a very hybrid war. It’s a war on the battlefield. It’s an intelligence war. It’s a war of narratives,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera. “And then there’s also an information war, which includes disinformation, half-truths and strategic leaks.”
[Aljazeera]
Where once ODI bilaterals could have been fairly mocked for their lack of relevance, they are played less and less, and this series has a bit of heat to it. Qualification for the 2027 ODI World Cup is on the line, and both these sides know what it’s like to be left out of a major international tournament (both were missing from the last Champions Trophy, and West Indies had also not played the 2023 World Cup).
On March 31, 2027, the eight highest-ranking teams – aside from hosts South Africa and Zimbabwe – will qualify automatically for the World Cup, and teams slightly lower will have to fight their way in through a qualifier. Currently Sri Lanka are ranked sixth in ODIs, while West Indies are ninth. Both teams could do with a rankings boost.
Sri Lanka are in slightly better shape coming into this series. They have, at the very least, played ODIs this year, losing 2-1 at home to England. West Indies have lost four of their last five ODIs, and have not played the format for six months. Both teams have more or less their regular ODI troops to pick from, however. Sri Lanka’s seam stocks are in especially good health at present.
Sri Lanka’s ODI captaincy has been one of cricket’s most-puzzling roulette wheels over the past ten years. Kusal Mendis had had the job until 2024, when he was ousted with no reason provided. He has again been put in charge, perhaps with a view to him leading Sri Lanka into that 2027 World Cup campaign. There’s been little to recommend him for the role than his own buoyant batting form, however. How will he fare this time in what has turned out to be one of cricket’s most tumultuous positions?
With an average of 50.52 and 19 hundreds in this format, West Indies captain Shai Hope is the only batter in the series who can be called a reliable run machine. Hope hasn’t played competitive cricket since the T20 World Cup, but does have a decent record against Sri Lanka, against whom he has hit two ODI hundreds and four fifties. Like his opposite wicketkeeper-batter-captain Mendis, Hope will be a key figure as West Indies begin their push towards the 2027 World Cup in earnest.
West Indies will need to find a spot for Shimron Hetmyer, who is back in the ODI format. Ackeem Auguste may make way at the top of the order to allow Hetmyer back in. Gudakesh Motie will also likely lead the spin attack.
West Indies (possible): John Campbell, Shai Hope (capt.)(wk) , Keacy Carty, Shimron Hetmyer, Sherfane Rutherford, Roston Chase, Justin Greaves, Matthew Forde, Shamar Springer, Gudakesh Motie, Jayden Seales
Sri Lanka have serious decisions to make on the bowling front. In Dushmantha Chameera, Dilshan Madushanka, and Eshan Malinga, they have three bowlers capable of breaching 140kph.
Sri Lanka (possible): Kamil Mishara, Pathum Nissanka, Kusal Mendis (capt, wk), Pavan Rathnayake, Charith Asalanka, Janith Liyanage, Kamindu Mendis, Wanindu Hasaranga, Eshan Malinga, Dushmantha Chameera, Dilshan Madushanka
[Cricinfo]
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