Claim: Chris Gayle’s daughter, Shamilia Connell, managed to turn the tables and clinched victory against India in a recent cricket match.
Fact: Shamilia Connell is not Chris Gayle’s daughter. The accompanying video in the claim is doctored to show that the West Indies won whereas India actually won the cricket match in question.
On 26 December 2025, a user on Facebook posted a reel that showed a cricket match between the women cricket teams of West Indies and India. The reel contained the following embedded captions in Urdu:
“آج کرس گیل کی بیٹی نے اپنے باپ کا نام روشن کر دیا انڈیا کے ہاتھوں جیتا ہوا میچ چھین لیا”
“اخر میں گیل نے اپنی بیٹی کو گلے لگا لیا”
According to Google Translate, this reads as follows in English:
“Today Chris Gayle’s daughter made her father’s name shine by stealing the match won by India”
“Finally Gail hugs her daughter”
Fact or Fiction?
Conducting a Google search for “Chris Gayle daughter”, we found that Shamilia Connell is not his daughter. The search results led us to an Instagram post by Gayle which shows him celebrating his actual daughter’s eighth birthday. We also found news articles from 2016 confirming the birth of his daughter.
Soch Fact Check also searched for the name of the cricket player shown in the video in the claim—Shamilia Connell—but found no evidence that she was related to Gayle in any way.
Moreover, the video in the claim appears to be doctored. The strip showing the score at the bottom of the frame obviously appears to be superimposed, perhaps over the scorecard from the original footage. In the image below, the seemingly tampered areas are encircled in green:
In addition to this, the post being fact-checked makes a claim about a game between the West Indies and India. The accompanying video in the claim also shows a cricket match between the West Indies and India, evident from their traditional red and blue uniforms, respectively. However, the abbreviation for the team that is batting is given as “BAN” on the scorecard, which is normally used for the Bangladesh cricket team, as seen here and here.
Soch Fact Check then conducted a reverse image search of the keyframes of the video to find the original footage of the cricket match in question. The results led us to a YouTube video of the recent second ODI match between the women’s cricket teams of the West Indies and India, held on 24 December 2024. At 1:46:38, the live scorecard displayed in this video indicated that Connell had struck four runs against India’s P Rawal, better known as India’s right-arm off break bowler Pratika Rawal. This is seen in the video in the claim too, where Connell strikes four runs against a right-arm off break bowler, whose jersey says “PRATIKA”.
Searching for “Shamilia Connell batting India”, we found the original video of the second ODI match where Connell struck four runs against Rawal. Below is a screenshot of the original score panel that ran at the bottom of the frame at that moment:
As can be seen in the picture above, the West Indies could not have won directly after Connell scored a boundary because they still needed over a hundred runs to win the match. Contrary to the claim in the viral post, the game, in fact, concluded with India winning the match by 115 runs.
Virality
On Facebook, the reel amassed 3.3 million views and 72 K likes.
On TikTok, the video garnered 1.9 million plays and 56.3 K likes.
Conclusion: The West Indies batswoman in the video, Shamilia Connell, is not Chris Gayle’s daughter. Moreover, the video has been doctored to show that she scored a winning four runs, whereas the women’s cricket team of India actually won the match in question.
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Background image in cover photo: OneCricket
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