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ICC World Cup 2023: Empty seats don't paint nice picture

The scene will be entirely different at the same stadium when India face Pakistan on October 14

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The opening match at the World Cup started in a near-empty stadium. — AFP

By PTI

Published: Thu 5 Oct 2023, 9:43 PM

There will be two World Cups being held simultaneously in India.

The first one on days when Indian team plays and it will be even difficult to get hold of a ticket.

Virat Kohli made it clear in his Instagram post that no one should ask him for tickets. The stands will be jam-packed and you will feel ODI cricket is alive and kicking.

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The other one is more stark in contrast like the opening game between current champions England and runners-up New Zealand at the Narendra Modi Stadium, which saw the presence of barely 10,000 people at the start.

The two teams, which played the greatest World Cup match during that epic final at the Lord's in 2019, perhaps wouldn't have visualised empty stands staring at them.

Looking dapper in jet black suit, ICC's Global Ambassador Sachin Tendulkar walked in with the trophy but the greatest ODI batter of all time, even in retirement, wouldn't be used to this kind of tepid response.

Witnessing the empty stands at the start of the match, Tendulkar's former teammate Virender Sehwag wrote on X: "Hopefully, after office hours, there should be more people coming in. But for games not featuring Bharat (India), there should be free tickets for school and college children. With the fading interest in 50 over game, it will definitely help that youngsters get to experience a World Cup game and players get to play in front of a full stadium."

By the time, the sun stopped beating down hard on Thursday, some more fans turned up, but the numbers didn't go beyond 17,000.

An official from the Gujarat Cricket Association had earlier told reporters that they were expecting about 50,000 fans for the opening game.

There were also reports of 30,000-40,000 women from the city being given free tickets to watch the game but that did not seem to be the case for the large part of the first innings of the game as empty stands told the story.

"I guess it is due to the heat," said Viraj Shah from Ahmedabad, who currently lives in Canada and works in the oil and gas industry.

"It was great for me that my trip back home coincided with the start of the World Cup. I booked my tickets online for this match but have yet to find one for the India-Pakistan match," he added.

The F, G and H stands remained largely empty on Thursday due to direct exposure to the sun and it was only around 5 pm local time that there were some number of people taking their seats.

However, the scene would be entirely different a week from now when the biggest game of the group stage takes place at the same stadium between arch-rivals India and Pakistan on October 14.

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PTI

Published: Thu 5 Oct 2023, 9:43 PM

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