Scouting for tickets is an arduous task

Gaining admittance to the World Cup is proving to be an onerous task. Three days before the mega event, fans are still scouting the city for tickets and scores have had to return empty-handed.
In an effort to gauge the situation, HT visited several outlets on Thursday and found that the process of distributing tickets was far from satisfactory.

The Fast Trax outlet at Don Bosco School, Alaknanda, had been issued tickets for only the India-Pakistan match (February 28). “The 200 (tickets, each worth Rs 100) were sold out three days ago. We don’t have tickets for any other match yet,” said a worker.

The Café Coffee Day (CCD) outlet in Greater Kailash I was slightly better off. After handing over six tickets for the India-Spain match (March 4), the outlet manager said he had tickets of only till that match. “We get 100 tickets for each match-day and the batch for matches after the 4th will come in a couple of days,” he said. Asked for tickets to the India-Pak match, he smiled, “You are late. The 100 (tickets) were gone within minutes.”
“I have come from Ghaziabad to buy tickets. I have tried the Union Bank outlets, including the one at Barakhamba Road, but was shooed away. The CCD outlet in Janpath had a few tickets for the March 4 matches,” lamented Suresh Dutt, an employee with Airport Authority of India.

Each of the 47 listed outlets receives up to 200 tickets for each match-day. This comes to 9400 tickets for a stadium that boasts of capacity of 19000, a deficit of almost 10,000. The figure however, does not take into account the ambiguous number available online.