ICC World Cup 2023: Michael Vaughan gives suggestion on how to fill stadiums
The mega event is being held in India
The ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 is being held in India across 10 different venues but the low attendance has taken away the spark from the matches.
World Cup’s opener between England and New Zealand was played at the Narendra Modi Stadium, a venue that can gather as many as 132,000 spectators at a time, but it was more or less empty at the time the match started.
However, by the time the match was about to end, the attendance was recorded around 47,500.
Fans turning up in low numbers has raised serious concerns among the cricket fraternity.
Similarly, former England captain Michael Vaughan weighed on this issue and suggested a way to fill the empty stadium in a post on his X, formerly known as Twitter, account.
“Crowds are looking very poor at the World Cup .. Surely we should be giving tickets away to make sure the stands are full .. #CWC2023,” Vaughan wrote on X.
It must be noted that the International Cricket Council (ICC) and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) have handled the entire ticketing process in a poor way.
Firstly, ICC announced the World Cup fixtures just 100 days before the start of the mega event. The delayed announcement was criticised by fans who gave reference of the previous two World Cups where the schedule was announced 12 months ago.
Not just that, the BCCI made things — that were already difficult — more complicated by announcing a revised World Cup schedule.
The dates of some of the matches, including the much-anticipated India-Pakistan encounter, were changed.
The tickets were put on sale for the general public on August 25, just 41 days before the start of the mega event.
Despite tickets being sold this late, the World Cup organisers did not do any favour to the fans as the entire ticketing process was nowhere near hassle-free. First, the fans would have to register to book their tickets and then wait for hours before having a chance to buy them.
It is worth mentioning that the World Cup has started and the Pakistani fans and journalists have not yet received Indian visas.
