The perils of procarsination

This man is lucky, not everyone was able to get a ticket for Monday’s upcoming first one-day international between Pakistan and India. Instead, as Ashfaq Yusufzai pointed out in Dawn yesterday, some people ended up on the receiving end of a lathi charge by the local police.

This is nothing unusual or new of course. Close followers of the game in the sub-continent can associate such incidents with ticket sales for most international games.

Ticket sales always begin before hand online, and the PCB likes to point that out whenever anyone criticises their ways in these matters, but this argument is hopelessly flawed. Truth is that the overwhelming majority of people who seek tickets have little or close to no online access, and even if they do, some of them, like me, prefer to buy them off line, in real life.

Given the knowledge that any tickets for any matches will always be high in demand, especially for ODIs, and even more so when a match is being held in a city like Peshawar, which doesn’t usually get a lot of cricket, why on earth would you want to wait till the very last minute to beggin ticket sales?

Such procrastination is an open invitation to black marketers and impulsive fans that might get angry and impatient if they miss out, and then minor outbursts, like the one described in the story above, follow. Of course, you can’t keep everyone happy, in a city of over 2 million people, not everyone one will get tickets, but at least, starting from well in advance will ensure maximum number of people get their tickets by legal means and minimum will get ripped off buying them at exuberant last minute hiked prices.

What is most annoying for me is that this happens every season without fail yet the PCB remains oblivious to its shortcomings, and ticket sales never go on sale well in advance as they ought to. It is no surprise hence that I have no idea when ticket sales for the final ODI in Karachi will begin, the match is now less then a fortnight away.

Incidentally, only the other day some one was telling me how they were about to buy their tickets for a Pakistan-England test in August! And did I even mention that the tickets for the 2007 Ashes are already on sale?

Cross posted on Different Strokes