ISL 2017: Kerala Blasters fans allegedly hack Indian Super League website to rig Goal of the Week award

What’s the story?

While the official ISL website shows that Kerala Blasters’ star CK Vineeth has won the Fan’s Goal of the Week award, a number of Chennaiyin FC supporters have alleged that it was indeed their home star Dhanapal Ganesh’s winning header against Bengaluru FC, that actually won the weekly award.

In case you didn’t know…

Both Chennaiyin FC and Kerala Blasters FC registered narrow wins last week, against Bengaluru FC and NorthEast United FC.

The Blasters, who had been struggling this season, got their first win of ISL 2017 under their belt, as forward CK Vineeth nodded in a Rino Anto cross against the Highlanders.

Meanwhile, Chennaiyin were up against Bengaluru FC in the much-anticipated South Indian Derby, where the 2016 champions came up trumps at the Sree Kanteerava Stadium, thanks to a late winner from their local hero Dhanapal Ganesh.

Heart of the matter

While both goals seem to be worthy of the award, only one was destined to actually win it. What seemed to be a close race between Vineeth and Ganesh, eventually turned out to be quite something else according to Chennaiyin FC supporters.

An official at Chennaiyin took to Twitter to voice her concerns about what she believes was a case of vote rigging. While Ganesh seemed to have been leading the back for the award initially, the number of votes he had received from the fans were allegedly reduced, in order to put Vineeth in the lead. The fan in question even went on to allege that the Kerala supporters had hacked the ISL website and rigged the votes.

After we took the lead, KBFC fans overtook us & it was a close race. Meanwhile, they complained to ISL & demanded the voting numbers be released instead of the %. After ISL released it, they grew insecure, hacked the page,tweaked Dhanpal's votes,announced CKV as winner & ran away pic.twitter.com/FiZTW7zJWi

— Jeni (@JenishaRani) December 19, 2017

While there has been no confirmation on this issue as of yet, a source close to the tournament organisers strongly hinted at vote rigging by the Kerala fans.

“We cannot speak about this issue as of yet, but there is a strong suspicion that something fishy is going on, as Kerala Blasters players always seem to win these awards,” said the source.

What’s next?

While a lot of the air is yet to be cleared regarding this matter, it seems that CK Vineeth has won the Fans’ Goal of the Week award for now.

Author’s take

Awards like these do help to keep the fans attached to the tournament. However, the teams andtheir players can hardly afford to attach much importance to these, as winning the tournament itself would be much higher on their agenda than individual awards.