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    Ticket availability for The Ashes

    By Will 3 years ago, mid-April Leave a comment on this post

    The BBC highlight how scarce tickets have been for English & Australian fans for this summer’s Ashes. In fact, scarce is the wrong word: they’ve been sold out for bloody months. Interestingly…

    Fans do still have a chance of going to the fifth day of an Ashes match this year with most grounds, including Lord’s, not selling final day tickets in advance.

    It also highlights the numbers of tickets (and the exorbitant prices - showing demand) available on eBay, as I mentioned a couple of weeks back.

    Scott from Ubersportingpundit takes up the ticket-scarcity issue with a different line, though, questioning how the hell they’ve sold out at all.

    I think there are quite a few reasons. Firstly, it’s The Ashes. Even a sportsfan, and not a hardline cricket-nut, knows the significance of any cricket match played between England and Australia. So that’s one. Secondly, *any* cricket fan in this country - be they minor or major - would want to see England and Australia play in an Ashes contest and I’m sure they would amount to a large percentage of the tickets sold. And thirdly, bloody corporations have probably bought up hundreds and hundreds of tickets in advance.

    It’s true, Cricket isn’t Football and does suffer as a result. The past 20 years has seen some truly crap cricket by England, combined with some underachieving players and shit coaches. Public lost faith, media took the piss - but that’s turning around now, thanks in large part to Flintoff. It’s going to take time though to get borderline cricket fans to cross over to genuine lovers of the game - so continued success of the National team is absolutely vital to the popularity of the game in England.

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    One Response to “Ticket availability for The Ashes”

  • Martin wrote:
    April 21st, 2005 at 8.20 am

    This is exactly what happend to my loyal group of England fans.

    We’ve organised a minibus trip to the Oval Test for every year since the Pakistan tour of 1992. Each year the same person applies to the Oval for 15 tickets and we’ve always been allocated all of them for either Thursday or Friday. We can’t go on Saturday or Sunday because we’re supporting the grass roots of the game by playing for our clubs.

    This year the same routine. He is on the mailing list so received his application form as usual and mailed it straight back with the order. Then he heard nothing at all and when he telephoned to chase up the application was told that he had been unsuccesful and most of the tickets had been sold to Surrey Members.

    So our reward for twelve years of loyalty? Absolutely nothing.

    How does it make me feel?
    Totally pissed-off with the ECB yet again. It doesn’t seem to matter that the Oval have increased their capacity with the new stand.

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