Posts about a cricket game being played by burqa-clad women have been circulating on social media. The image supposedly shows a televised cricket match featuring the Bangladesh women’s cricket team playing against New Zealand. In the image, two women are depicted in full black burqas over cricket shin-pads and gloves.
While some comments do speculate over whether the image is real, many others seem to be either heavily critisising or praising the women under the assumption that the image is accurate. We also observed heated exchanges involving religion and ethnicity occurring between some comments.
Although Bangladesh is a majority Muslim country, Islamic dress is not legally compulsory. While some Bangladeshi women do wear the burqa, some opt for different head coverings and others do not veil at all.
While the claim image does not look overly manipulated or edited, we looked deeper to see if other videos or images exist of the cricket match in question. Based on what we could find, a Women’s World Cup match was played between the two countries on 10 October, with New Zealand taking the win.
A look at clips from match highlights show a similar scorecard graphics to the claim image. However, unlike the claim image, none of the women playing in the match appear to be wearing burqas at all. The Bangladesh team are instead clad in green uniforms – with some players wearing caps or helmets and some not wearing any headgear.
A look at the Bangladesh women’s cricket team’s page on the International Cricket Council (ICC) website also shows pictures of the team in other matches with no burqa in sight. We could find no instances from official sources or reputable cricket outlets of any professional women’s cricket team wearing burqas during a match, although players from other teams have donned hijabs.
The claim image, therefore, appears to have been fabricated. Based on what we could find, it began circulating on the internet after 10 October but cannot be attributed to a single source. The quality of most iterations of the image also appears to be extremely low and blurry, making it hard for some AI-detectors to discern if it is AI-generated. However, a closer look at the bottom right corner of the image reveals a small Google Gemini logo, which is watermarked into images generated using its AI image tool.
Therefore, we give this claim a rating of false. The Bangladesh Women’s cricket team are playing in the ongoing 2025 Women’s Cricket World Cup but are not clad in burqas. The image has been AI-generated and used to spread misinformation across various social media accounts.
Claims with religious undertones easily spark heated debate and conflict, especially when accompanied by visual media such as images and videos. This claim is an example of how AI image tools can easily draw on recent events (such as the cricket match) to produce convincing (but entirely fake) content that is easily sharable to thousands or even millions of users before being debunked or corrected.
