A collage of photos showing Indian Women’s hockey players celebrating on the field while players of the Australian team hold their heads is being shared with a claim that these photos show an alleged world championship that the Indian team won. This is being shared as revenge taken on the Australians after the Indian Men’s cricket team lost to them in the final match of the men’s cricket World Cup 2023. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: The Indian women’s hockey team has won the World Championship by defeating the Australian team recently.
Fact: Recently, no hockey tournament named the World Championship was held. The recent hockey tournament that the Indian women’s hockey team won was the Asian Champions trophy, which they won by defeating Japan in the final held on 5 November 2023 much before the men’s cricket World Cup final which was held on 19 November 2023. Hence, the claim made in the post is false.
To learn more about the viral claim we performed a keyword search on the internet about it using relevant keywords. This search did not yield any credible information to validate the claim that the Indian Women’s hockey team won against Australia in a World Championship.
A further search revealed (here, here, and here) that the latest tournament that the Indian women’s team won was the Asian Champions trophy which they won by defeating the Japanese team in the Final, on 5 November 2023. This is neither called the World Championship the viral post claims to be nor was the opponent here Australia. Also, this took place way before the final of the Men’s Cricket World Cup, which was played on 19 November 2023. This makes it clear that the viral claim was just a fabricated statement.
To see if there is any tournament named World Championship as mentioned in the viral post, we performed a keyword search on the internet. This search revealed that there is no such event in women’s field hockey but there is a tournament which is named Hockey Women’s World Cup. The final of this tournament was held in July 2022 and was won by the Netherlands against Argentina.
Additionally, the photos shared as a collage through this viral post are not new, they are from the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (here and here).
To sum up, old photos are being shared with fabricated news that the Indian women’s hockey team has won a match against the Australian team to win the world championship trophy.
