Mehul Shah (name changed to protect privacy) is a cricket fan and has booked three rooms in a five-star hotel in Ahmedabad for his friends from Mumbai and Jaipur. They will travel to watch the much-anticipated ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup match between India and Pakistan to be played at the Narendra Modi Stadium, the world’s largest cricket stadium, with over 1 lakh seats, on October 14.
In Ahmedabad, nearly all hotels and guests houses have been sold out at the time, as more than 30,000 people from out of station are expected to arrive to watch the match.
However, Shah and others who have arranged the peripheral logistics like accommodation and taxis, are now scrambling for tickets. With none available at the venue, buying a ticket on BookMyShow.com, which has been appointed as the ticketing partner for the whole tournament, scheduled to start from October 5, is also proving to be difficult. Shah says he has had no luck on the online platform.
In the entire tournament involving 10 countries, the India-Pakistan match at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad is the most keenly anticipated game between the two neighbouring countries whose relationship is frozen in all fields except cricket. As a result, there is a heightened interest in the match, leading to an enormous demand for tickets.
The stadium is managed by the Gujarat Cricket Association (GCA) whose president is Dhanraj Nathwani, son of parliamentarian and top Reliance functionary Parimal Nathwani. The GCA has no say in the selling or distribution of tickets thanks to centralised system created by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) which is helmed by former cricketer Roger Binny as President and Jay Shah, son of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, as Secretary, while Congress parliamentarian Rajiv Shukla is another top functionary in the world’s richest cricket organisation.
The world class cricketing venue has as many as 75 boxes with each box having 25 seats and the presidential box having 75 seats. Of 75 boxes, 50 boxes are corporate boxes while the remaining 25 are managed by the GCA. However, The Hindu has learnt that all the boxes have been reserved for “guests”, but there is no clarity about who are the “guests” are, or even the number of general tickets sold so far for the India-Pakistan clash.
Earlier, ex-Indian cricketer Venkatesh Prasad took to X (formerly Twitter) suggesting that BCCI streamline the ticketing booking process. “I urge the @BCCI to have more transparency in the World Cup ticketing system and not take fans for granted. Definitely in a stadium like Ahmedabad, for an #IndvsPak clash, more than the sold 8,500 tickets need to be available when the capacity is 1 lakh,” he wrote, adding that for all the other matches too, a larger chunk needed to be for the fans, rather than reserving so many for corporates and members.
Ticket-booking trouble is not limited to just India’s matches against other countries. Cricket lovers claim they have not been able to book tickets for other matches as well. BookMyShow had rolled out tickets in two phases: pre-sale for Mastercard holders, since Mastercard is a global partner of ICC, and general sale for others.
When fans faced problems booking tickets and thousands vented their frustration on social media platforms, the booking agency had come out with a statement on September 1, saying, “The love for cricket in our country has always been unparalleled and it has been no different these past few days as several million fans logged onto BookMyShow, all at once, to get their hands on limited tickets for the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023. We understand that not all fans had an easy time, experiencing queues and eventually heartbreak in their attempt to book tickets,” the statement read.
