Empty stadia or Full Stadia?

The lifeblood of any sport is the fan following each sport has. This has been true for the better part of sporting history. If you asked a sportsman what he/she would rather have, they'd be unanimous in their choice. They would want stadiums filled to the brim with passionate fans egging them on to greater deeds on the field. This seems like such a simple and evident truth to us at Fans On Stands and also to most sports fans. But strangely it seems to elude the administrators of various sports. None more so than Cricket and the BCCI/ICC. 

The ongoing Cricket World Cup is an unmitigated disaster if you are a cricket fan who wants to go to the ground to catch his/her favorite team in action. If you don't have the right connections or the right job (read - a job with a World Cup Sponsor for eg), you don't stand a chance of getting a ticket to the game. The recent fiasco in Bangalore surrounding ticket sales for the key India vs England clash is a case in point. Apparently there were 6000 tickets to be sold at the counters. Fans queued up almost a day in advance to try and buy a ticket. All they got for their trouble was to get caned by the police and also a shambolic ticket distribution system which disbursed less than half the reported number of tickets. Many thousands returned home empty handed with some injuries to boot while trying to evade the free swinging canes of the cops. The fans who went home empty handed consoled themselves with the thought that they could watch the match on TV.

But what a match it was. An absolute humdinger and like a friend who was at the match said, the fans got India back into the game and almost got England to choke. The atmosphere at the Chinnaswamy stadium is always electric and on an important match day like last Sunday, its something to be experienced. Cricket is at best a very quiet game in its traditional avatar but in India every cricket game is as loud as it gets be it Test match cricket, T20 cricket or ODI cricket. We know what we'd rather have, a full stadium always and we echo the sportmen too on that we're sure! We don't really know what the administrators think though!