CRICKET:WARRING OFFICIALS, the shortage of public tickets for India's high-profile matches and violent clashes between fans and baton-wielding police took the spotlight away from the players at the World Cup yesterday.
On a day when the cricket community should have been hailing Imran Tahir’s four-wicket haul on his ODI debut and AB de Villiers’s brilliant century as South Africa thumped West Indies by seven wickets, the World Cup looked like it was turning into another public relations disaster for India.
The tournament’s top official was severely criticised after police battered hundreds of fans with bamboo sticks outside Bangalore’s M Chinnaswamy Stadium as anger at the lack of tickets for the clash between India and England boiled over.
In a letter leaked to the media, the governing body of the sport (ICC) accused its president, Sharad Pawar, of mismanagement and said he was “threaten(ing) to undermine” the whole tournament with the way tickets were being distributed – or rather not being distributed – in India.
Pawar, who is also the chairman of the tournament’s central organising committee, was under attack for bringing the ICC’s relationship with its corporate sponsors to “breaking point” as they had yet to receive their allocation of tickets despite investing millions of dollars into the event.
In Bangalore, meanwhile, violence erupted after thousands of fans who had camped outside the 50,000-seat stadium since Wednesday were told all 7,000 tickets allocated for public sale for Sunday’s India v England game had sold out.
“The policemen are torturing the people. What the hell is going on?” one anguished fan said outside the stadium. The severity of the situation did not seem to obviously register among those responsible for running the sport.
“The biggest challenge we face today is to meet the expectations of the people, that is not possible, that is never possible,” former player Javagal Srinath, who is now the secretary of the Karnataka Cricket Association responsible for the Bangalore match, told a news conference.
“There is a limit where we can keep people happy. There is not much we can do. Around 7,000 tickets were all sold out in three hours,” a bizarrely grinning Srinath added as he exchanged jokes with the assembled media.
However, it was no laughing matter for those fans who had queued up all night on a dusty lane desperate to get their hands on the tickets that are turning out to be more precious than a Maharajah’s fortune. After the box office sold its quota of tickets by 11.30am local time, those who missed out vented their frustration by hitting out at police, causing damage to the area.
The venue was given hosting rights for the highly-anticipated Group B match after the ICC was unhappy with the preparations at the 100,000-seater Eden Gardens in Kolkata.
Ticket sales for the tournament have proven to be a major headache for organisers, who are unable to meet demand for the high-profile matches, especially those featuring India as well as the April 2nd final in Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium. Indian cricket board officials simply shrugged off the fiasco by saying “these things happen in India”.
At least on the field, there was nothing to gripe about – certainly for South African fans. Graeme Smith’s men took their first steps towards making it to the final as AB de Villiers’ unbeaten 107 powered South Africa to a seven-wicket victory over West Indies.
