Editorial
World Cup ticket fiasco
A bad beginning leaving a lesson for future
Certainly a large number of cricket fans will have their hopes to see the ICC World Cup live inside the stadium dashed. The entire episode of ticket sale has been a mess at best. It was very disheartening to see the initial enthusiasm left dampened. One had hoped that such an important aspect of the tournament, would have been organised in a more professional and skillful manner. We have been thoroughly disappointed by what we have witnessed so far.
To start with, one detected a degree of opacity in the process of sale of tickets including making public the number of tickets that would be made available to them. In fact the BCB came out with three different figures on three different occasions, the last being on the 1st of Jan, confounding the confusion.
And to add to the confusion, the ticketing and seating committee did not know the exact number of tickets to be put on sale for the public till even the day before the tickets went on sale because, reportedly, of, "mounting demand for tickets from different communities". Was is not only predictable? One couldn't have expected a more slipshod manner of handling a basic aspect to an international event that Bangladesh is hosting to its great pride.
This brings us to the very important question of the total tickets made available for open sale to the public, which is dependent on the seating capacity of the match venues. The two venues in Dhaka and Chittagong are not as big as the Bangabandhu National Stadium which is a multi-purpose venue. We should have known that we do not have a large-capacity stadium entirely devoted to cricket were importance of the pitch and the right kind of outfield are also key elements.
We understand that chairs had to be placed on the galleries as per requirement of the ICC, but knowing the large following of cricket in the country, and given that the ICC World Cup takes place every four years Bangladesh's turn should have been put to optimum use. Therefore, shouldn't the organisers have thought it prudent to increase the seating capacity of the match venues? As it is, at any given time 25 thousand people throng a stadium for a local match, not to speak of a cricket world cup! We fail to understand also the logic of keeping more than 30 percent of the tickets reserved.
If there is one lesson that the authorities must learn from it, it is that there must be bigger and more spacious cricket venue to cater to the increasing number of enthusiasts of the game.
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