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Kiwi cricket fan amazed abuse complaint in NZ led to Southampton fans' removal

June 23, 2021

Dominic da Souza tweeted the ICC from his couch in Auckland about the abuse and soon after, security was on the job.

Many Kiwi cricket fans would have been glued to their televisions last night but for some there was an unwelcome distraction in the World Test Championship final coverage.

With only 4000 fans at Southampton watching the Black Caps and India, the on-field mics were picking up plenty of noise – including abuse towards the New Zealanders.

“There was just this kind of quite persistent voice in the background just yelling,” viewer Dominic da Souza Correa said.

“It started to come through as abuse.”

As we live in an age where the world is at your fingertips, da Souza Correa sent off a tweet to see if he could get it stopped.

“[They were] a couple of people that were just behaving obnoxiously, ruining it for other people, ruining it as a spectacle,” he said.

Within a minute, the head of communications at the ICC – Claire Furlong - replied asking where da Souza Correa was sitting.

The plot twist – da Souza Correa, of course, was in Auckland on the other side of the world watching the match on television.

The Aucklander explained that to Furlong and to his pleasant surprise was told they’d look into it.

“To their credit, they took it really seriously,” he said.

“Obviously these people were pretty easy to single out because it didn't take long for them to message me saying two people had been identified and removed.”

Despite reports the abuse was racially motivated, the ICC said they found no evidence of that, instead calling it unsavoury.

The Kiwi players didn't hear it but the resulting silence was golden for bleary-eyed fans watching into the wee hours of this morning, like a chuffed da Souza Correa.

“It’s kind of crazy being on the other side of the world, in the middle of the night, and just being able to have that kind of effect.”

A social media victory he's hoping will be topped off with a win of another kind tonight.

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