By Syed Tashfin Chowdhury
DHAKA - US-based ESPN Star Sports and Star Cricket paid US$2 billion for broadcasting rights to next month's International Cricket Council (ICC) World Cup, to be hosted by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Yet less than one month before the February 19 opening event in the one-day per match competition - and barely three months after India desperately struggled to complete preparations to host the Commonwealth Games - the subcontinent is again
raising doubts about its ability to stage international sporting events.
Five of the 13 stadiums involved are not yet ready (as of the start of this week), and organizers are awaiting the results of the latest ICC inspection prior to the January 31 handover deadline.
The competition has gripped the interest of the sub-continent, where cricket is the leading sport. International companies such as soft-drinks giant Pepsi and sportsgoods maker Reebok have signed up as "commercial partners" to get their names in front of the estimated 2 billion audience that will watch the six-week long competition. Other partners include India's Reliance, South Korea's LG and Hyundai, Emirates Airlines and Yahoo.
Waiting in the wings are teams from 14 countries, led by top one-day side Australia, closest rival India, third-ranked Sri Lanka, hotly fancied South Africa and England. They will battle through group and knock-out stages with the aim of reaching the April 2 final of the month-and-a-half long tournament.
Up to 2 million tickets for the pre-knock out part of the series were quickly sold out - reportedly netting as much as US$32 million.
Yet even here, there were signs of lack of preparation. In Bangladesh, queues up to 3 kilometers long formed as fans fought for tickets to see local captain and heartthrob Sakib Al-Hasan take on India's all-time great batsman Sachin Tendulkar in the competition's opening match. The lucky ones secured their right to tickets only after a fiasco of poor planning, bureaucratic overbearance, technological bungling and a display of disdain for the paying public.
Of the tournament's 49 matches, 29 will be staged in India, 12 in Sri Lanka and eight in Bangladesh. Both India and Sri Lanka have prior experience of these events. India was a world cup co-host in 1987 with Pakistan and again in 1996, alongside Pakistan and Sri Lanka. (In the 1996 cup, riots at Eden Garden led to Sri Lanka being awarded a semi-final victory over India.)
The ICC stripped Pakistan of its right, awarded in 2006, to co-host this year's cup after terrorists attacked the visiting Sri Lankan team in Lahore in 2009.
Security measures to help avoid terrorist attacks during this year's competition include no-fly zones above venues and nearby areas being declared no-fly zones, make-shift road-side shops near venues being demolished and all houses within about 300 meters of the venues being covered by security personnel mostly on roof tops. Vehicles other than team buses and official cars will be barred from restricted zones.
ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat said the ICC has matured in terms security issues [since the 2009 Lahore attack], ESPN reported on January 15. "All full members have now got a security manager and the ICC has got a security manager, unlike in the past where we might have been relying entirely on independent experts or police agencies to provide the security. I'm quite confident with the measures that we've got in place ... that it will be well done."
Lorgat admitted on January 15 that in India and Sri Lanka work on five stadiums was running behind schedule.
"The stadiums are slightly behind - there's four in particular, I think - but we'll be done before the start of the World Cup. I'm sure that we'll be ready well before the start of the World Cup," Lorgat said, according to a BBC report.
The Wankhede Stadium in Mumbai, built in 1974 and to host two group matches and the April 2 final, is still undergoing major renovations, as is the aging 80,000-seat Eden Gardens (established 1864) in Kolkata, due to host four group matches.
Sri Lanka Cricket chairman DS de Silva last week also tried to play down concerns over work at the island's three cup venues and denied claims in the Sunday Leader that its reporters were refused access to the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, Pallekele Stadium in Kandy and Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium in Hambantota earlier in the month.
"Apart from Hambantota, only the cleaning phase is left in the other two stadiums," the BBC reported de Silva as saying. "Both R Premadasa Stadium and Pallekele Stadium are 99% ready. I hope Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium [in Hambantota] will also be ready soon.
Hambantota will stage Sri Lanka's opening game - the stadium's first ever cricket competition - on February 20, against Canada, with Kenya versus Pakistan to follow three days later.
The lack of readiness of India's venues became apparent last year, when a $55 million renovation of Wankhede, started two years ago, and a $10 million makeover of the historic Eden Gardens failed to meet a November 30 progress deadline.
An inspection led by ICC events manager Chris Tetley in late November and early December led to an ICC warning that if construction work at these venues was not completed by January 15, "it is not possible to confirm that the venues will be in a suitable condition to be handed over by January 31".
Lalchand Rajput, joint honorary secretary of the Mumbai Cricket Association, said delays at Wankhede were due to "late monsoon rains", but that work was "still on track", AFP reported on January 9.
The ICC's December 2010 evaluation report was particularly critical about Eden Gardens: "Unfortunately, the venue administration did not recognize the requirements of the event and were often unwilling to discuss or agree to what was required. There was a tendency to rely on experiences of previous World Cup matches which took place in 1996, and are not wholly relevant to the needs of stakeholders for Cricket WC 2011."
A January 9 AFP report said seats at Eden Gardens yet to fitted in many tiers and the outer walls of the venue had collapsed in some areas. Corporate boxes at the grounds were "far from complete" and the ground is "still being dug up" in some parts.
"It's impossible to complete such a massive project in just 11 months," AFP reported Sajal Pramanik, manager of the Shapoorji Pallanji construction company, in charge of construction of two new blocks of seating at the Eden, as saying. "We need time to complete the work. I think the roof on the eastern block cannot be fixed before February."
Organizers in Sri Lanka are also blaming heavy monsoon rains for the state of construction of its two new stadiums - the $9 million Pallekele in Kandy and the $13.6 million Mahindra Rajapaksa in Hambantota - and renovation of its third venue, the R Premadasa stadium in Colombo.
Local organizers in Sri Lanka and India said the ICC will issue positive reports following its most recent inspections by a three-member committee between January 22 and 25.
The ICC inspection team were "extremely happy with the outcome" of the work at the three Sri Lankan stadiums, Sri Lankan daily The Nation reported, quoting Sri Lanka ICC World Cup 2011 director Suraj Dandeniya.
Jagmohan Dalmiya, chief of the Cricket Association of Bengal and in charge of the Eden Gardens, said, "It appears to me that members of the ICC inspection team are happy with the progress of the work," Associated Press reported on January 25. "The World Cup matches will be played at these three venues as planned. None of the venues have been rejected."
Dandeniya said that they are putting "the finishing touches at Hambantota, the roofs and the roads leading to the stadiums. ... Premadasa Stadium and Pallakele are 99.9% complete."
Broadcaster ESPN also carried the positive view of ICC World Cup tournament director Ratnakar Shetty, who told ESPNcricinfo.com after the team's latest inspection of Wankhede, "As far as we are concerned, all the 13 venues which are going to stage the World Cup are coming up very well and we don't see any reason of concern."
Players who have to deal with the state of the pitches may not share the ICC's optimistic views. Just over a year ago, on December 27, 2009, the visiting Indian team abandoned a one-day match against Sri Lanka at the Feroz Shah Kotla stadium, one of this year's world cup venues, after the pitch was deemed "too dangerous" during the game.
While stadium concerns have focused on India and Sri Lanka, Bangladesh on the face of it appears better prepared, although its experience in hosting big cricket occasions is limited to a mini world cup in 1998 and an under-19 world cup in 2006.
The ICC on December 20 gave clean work-progress chits on the Sher-e-Bangla National stadium in Mirpur of Dhaka and the Chittagong Divisional stadium in Chittagong.
However, just five days before the ICC's December 11 inspection, a Bangladesh-Zimbabwe match at Chittagong was rescheduled from a day-night match to a day match after referee Chris Broad found there was insufficient light on the boundary area.
On December 10, the next Bangladesh-Zimbabwe match, also at the Chittagong stadium, was abandoned due to poor drainage, although not a drop of rain had fallen that day.
A day later, when the ICC inspection team entered the stadium and settled themselves at the presidential box, the sight screen at one end collapsed. Even so, the ICC days later gave the Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) its green light.
Mohammad Ali Ahsan Babu, who leads the Bangladesh organizing committee, told Asia Times Online on January 19 he is confident that the two main venues and two backups will be ready before January 31. "There is no concern whatsoever," he said.
That should please the successful few thousand fans among millions who queued day and night in Dhaka and elsewhere in Bangladesh to get tickets in early January. Sales outlets were limited to 80 branches of state-owned Agrani Bank and the privately owned City Bank from midnight of January 2.
Student Mohammad Mehedi Hasan, who failed in his efforts despite a 26-hour wait in bitterly cold conditions, lambasted a government that is "constantly talking about a 'Digital Bangladesh'" for failing to use appropriate technology.
A tedious round of form filling was required before payment receipts were issued, with further delays caused by slow Internet speeds to a central server maintained by Kyazoonga, an Indian company that won the official rights for ticket sales. The actual tickets cannot be collected until a week before the games start. The opening game was signaled as sold out within 30 minutes.
Each branch was allocated only 480 tickets per day, and cricket fans said some bank branches could not sell even these.
The Bangladesh Cricket Board added to frustration and confusion by frequently changing the figures for how many tickets would be available, as it became clear that thousands were being given away to the ICC and thousands more allocated to government officials. As late as January 1, cricket board president AHM Mustafa Kamal was explaining that yet more tickets would be unavailable due to the placement of sight screens.
When tickets did go on sale, frustrated fans vandalized cars in Dhaka and clashed with police who in some areas used baton charges to clear a way for bank staff trying to enter their offices.
As small consolation, even Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina could not promise to help ministers and secretaries who had requested her to deliver 20 tickets per official, Prothom Alo reported on January 4.
Instead, they will have to be content with watching the matches and lavish opening ceremony on TV, along with the thousands of vendors displaced by city clean-ups ($12 million in Chittagong alone) and ticketless millions of ordinary fans.
Mahfuzur Rahman Masum, commercial manager for the ICC Cricket World Cup Bangladesh 2011, told Asia Times Online that the opening extravaganza at Sher-e-Bangla National stadium would be delivered by Wizcraft, whose skills at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi last October helped to banish the cloud of doom that had settled over India in the crisis-laden build up to the eventually successful games.
Competing teams, in order of ranking are Australia, India, Sri Lanka, South Africa, England, Pakistan, New Zealand, West Indies, Bangladesh, Ireland, Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, Kenya and Canada.
Syed Tashfin Chowdhury is a senior staff writer at New Age in Dhaka.
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