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Ticketing Crisis a Failure for India, Cricket Fans
Would-be ticket buyers lining up in Bangalore Thursday, shortly before the beating
FEBRUARY 28, 2011, 4:17 A.M. ET
By RICHARD LORD
When a sport stages its marquee tournamentits ultimate global showcase, one that only happens every four yearsyou'd think the least it would be able to do is get tickets for the event into the hands of its fans.
Instead, at the current World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, a laughably small number of tickets are available to the public for big games; there have been chaotic scenes as fans clamor to get hold of the few tickets that actually are on sale at the grounds. People who bought tickets long ago still haven't received them, and neither have companies who are owed them as part of sponsorship packages. The website selling them crashed under the weight of demand as soon as tickets for the latter rounds went on sale.
With the tournament already under way, it's all pretty shambolic. It's hard to blame the International Cricket Council, the game's global governing body, for giving primary staging rights to the event to Indiathe commercial potential of the country is unmatched. But for the Indian cricketing authorities to then fail to exploit that potential by failing to get tickets to fans is unpardonable, particularly because it happened for such ludicrous reasons: the wrong people have been distributing the tickets, too many have been given away for free, and no one thought through what impact that tiny supply might have on demand. What's particularly frustrating is that India's sporting authorities don't seem to have learned their lesson from last year's Commonwealth Games in New Delhi, when stadiums were half-full after freebies went unused, but ticket offices were often thronged.
When the current tournament's final is played in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium on April 2, only 4,000 tickets will be available to the general public out of 33,000 seats currently available as the stadium's renovations are incomplete. They, along with tickets to other games in the knockout stages of the tournament, will now be allocated via an online lottery. When ticketing partner kyazoonga.com tried to make them publicly available a week ago, half a million people logged in concurrently, with predictably disastrous results.
If the website was a crush, even worse were the scenes at Bangalore's M Chinnaswamy Stadium on Thursday, when the 7,000 publicly available tickets for Sunday's game between India and England finally went on sale. The location had been switched a month ago from Kolkata's Eden Gardens, which was deemed unfit to host it. The M Chinnaswamy might be in better shape than Eden Gardens when it comes to hosting games, but evidently not when it comes to distributing tickets: the small number of tickets and antiquated facilities left many fans who had queued overnight unable to buy them, causing chaotic scenes when the box office opened, with police baton-charging fans, several of whom were carried away on stretchers.
The prospect of something similar happening when tickets for the final go on sale was raised recently in a letter from David Becker, head of legal at the ICC, to Sharad Pawar, its president, who's also chairman of the tournament's Central Organizing Committee. Leaked to an Indian TV station, the letter recommended avoiding a single, centralized box office because of the "potential for chaos and physical injury when the box office sales open." That, plus the Internet fiasco, has prompted the lottery.
The main reason tickets are in such short supply is that so many are given away freeto sponsors and commercial partners, but also to friends and associates of the organizers. That, of course, risks alienating the ordinary fan. Justice Sunil Gaur of the Delhi High Court certainly thinks so: Last week he directed the Delhi & District Cricket Association to give away no more than 10,000 complimentary tickets to each of the four World Cup matches at the city's 45,000-plus-capacity Feroz Shah Kotla stadium. After a legal challenge brought by one of the association's own members, Justice Gaur also stipulated that tickets of all price levels had to be sold publicly, and that they should be available both online and at a variety of physical outlets throughout the city.
Of course, governing bodies have to give away a certain number of tickets to their sponsors and commercial partners: it's part of the deal. But when only 4,000 tickets are available for the final at a 33,000-capacity stadiumitself a curiously small choice of venue in the first placeclearly the freebies are out of hand; the Delhi legal challenge alleged that many free tickets for games there are habitually given away for reasons that have nothing to do with promoting the sport. Worse, the free tickets that sponsors actually are entitled to frequently aren't getting to them.
That's because the sport's governing body in the country, the slightly sinisterly named Board of Control for Cricket in India, has chosen to allow individual state associations to organize ticketing for the event, rather than a central body; kyazoonga.com is supposed to just sell on tickets sent to it by the state associations, but in many cases it hasn't actually received them. The results: in some cases, tickets ordered more than six months ago haven't been delivered, causing a public relations disaster and prompting threats of legal action; and sponsors who have paid millions of dollars haven't received the ticket allocations they're due.
The ICC has been privately blaming the BCCI and telling sponsors there's nothing much it can do about it. The BCCI, it's worth remembering at this point, is one of the ICC's constituent bodies, but the ICC is a bottom-up organization that's run by its members rather than vice versaalthough it's unlikely that will wash with sponsors. "This is an $80 million sponsorship and to say you are bound by the BCCI is inexcusable," one partner is quoted as writing to Mr. Lorgat in Mr. Becker's letter.
Cricket is trying to present itself as a bright, shiny, 21st-century product, but the sport can still be appalling at logistics and organization, particularly at any level below the very highest. Putting the responsibility for distributing tickets to a global event in the hands of local bodies is an elementary tactical error, as is making such a pathetically small number of them available to the public. The losers, as ever, are the ordinary fans. If India's cricketing authorities keep treating them like this, sooner or later their patience is going to run out.
World Cup Ticketing Crisis a Failure for India, Cricket Fans - WSJ.com
Most of his time he spent for searching article related to India. lol
