Ticket sales fiasco

Jack Warner and his cohorts alone know why they decided to sell all the tickets at three venues on the day before the match. The meanest intelligence could have predicted what would occur — long lines, jostling, queue-breaking, and raised tempers. The only wonder was that, in these tense times, no one resorted to violence and even murder. But the organisers of this fiasco can take no credit for that. It is the police officers, drawn away from more important tasks by the football authorities’ atrocious planning, who were able to keep things from reaching extremes.

Mr Warner’s justification for the foolish arrangements does not withstand scrutiny. His argument was that he wanted to ensure that the "small man" had a fair chance to get into the stadium. But what actually happened was that the so-called small man was forced to stand for hours in a line from the wee hours of the morning, shoved and crushed, and may well have ended up paying three to six times more to get a scalper’s ticket. Moreover, the "big man" still ended up getting tickets without all this hassle, whether he had connections or hired someone to go in the line for him, or simply paid the scalper’s price. Mr Warner argued that, if people had had faith in the system, none of this would have occurred. This is pathetic. Not only is it unreasonable to expect that fans would have taken their leisurely time to go to the venues, but there is nothing that would justify them having faith in the system. Perhaps Mr Warner believes that people have forgotten November 19, 1989. But they have not and, indeed, the fans’ experience on Friday and Saturday amply justified faithlessness.

Mr Warner also failed to explain why selling tickets at a number of venues would have failed to cater to the average football fan. Are such persons incapable of walking into a TTPost outlet or a bank or a TSTT office to get tickets? Was it really likely that, in such a scenario, all the tickets would have been reserved for VIPs? Would such an arrangement have led to counterfeit tickets being printed? It certainly doesn’t seem that the authorities’ three-venue plan prevented some sort of "ratchefy," to use the local term, from taking place. After all, the 25,000 capacity stadium saw people sitting in the aisles for Saturday’s game although only 25,000 tickets were printed. So how did these apparently extra persons get in?

However, while the football authorities must take the major share of the blame, they cannot take all. The fans themselves bear a modicum of responsibility for their own frustration.

The fact is, in such a scenario, those in authority can only frustrate those who allow themselves to be frustrated. The people in charge knew that they could get away with this nonsense because the majority of fans would take the pressure, complain vociferously, but never take any effective action — like a boycott — that would send a message that they should be treated with respect and courtesy. And therein, perhaps, lies a larger lesson about our politics.