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Subhash Rajta
Tribune News Service
indore, september 23
So, you love cricket? Maybe you do but you can’t love the sport as much as the residents of Indore do. It’s of course a very provocative statement but it’s backed by some solid evidence. A couple of days back when the ticket windows opened to sell tickets for tomorrow’s ODI, an unimaginable number of people turned up to buy roughly 17,000 tickets put on sale.
No, that’s not the proof of their love for the game; it’s at best an evidence of their interest in the game. The proof of their love for the game lies in the fact that a huge number of them had lined up in front of the ticket windows at around 11am the day before the tickets were to be sold, and stood there through the day and the night to ensure they got the tickets the next morning. “I also came here a day before the tickets were to be sold, but the line had already become pretty huge by then. So, I had no choice but to go home,” said a local college student. Now, can someone beat that?
Confirming that people did stay queued up throughout the night, Mayank Thanwar, a scorer with the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association, said that close to 5,000 people had turned up to just watch practice sessions during the India-New Zealand series last year. “The association issued passes for the practice sessions and around 5,000 people turned up during the nets,” said Thanwar. “The crowd, however, didn’t behave and the players found it very hard to train. Virat Kohli complained about it, and the system of issuing passes for practice days was promptly scrapped.” Well, venues like Mohali or Nagpur don’t get a crowd of 5,000 even on a day of Test cricket.
It may have stopped these cricket crazy fans from entering the stadium but nothing could stop them from gathering around the stadium. They milled around, shouting and screaming at every vehicle entering and leaving the stadium. For them, cricket isn’t sport, it’s a festival. And they celebrate it like no one else does!
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