Cricket Fans Urged to Purchase Tickets Through Official Channels

Cricket fans are being encouraged to purchase their tickets for the ICC Cricket World Cup (CWC) 2007 through the official channels, or risk being denied entry to match venues.
Tickets are available upon application to www.cricketworldcup.com and at the official ICC CWC 2007 ticket offices in all host venue countries. In Jamaica, the office is located at Shops 51 and 52 in Kingston Mall downtown.
“If you buy the ticket through official sources, you will not have any problem,” said Derek Jones, Senior Legal Counsel for the ICC CWC 2007 Inc.
Indeed, the ICC CWC 2007 Inc. has been cracking down on scalpers, some of whom have advertised tickets for sale on eBay. “If you buy a ticket on the eBay website, you run a real risk that when you come to the ground for a match they [authorities] may actually know that you bought that ticket on eBay and you may have the privilege of going back home to watch the game on television,” he pointed out.
Furthermore, he added, “you may not find the eBay man to get back the money spent”.
In early January, some 200 tickets for the event, including some for top matches, were made null and void, when persons tried to resell them on auction websites, which is contrary to the Ticketing Terms and Conditions.
The event organizers also made the decision not to offer any refunds as a means of sending a strong message to would be scalpers. “You do not want the event to get the reputation that people are being gorged for tickets and therefore one of the mechanisms that you use to control that is you only have official authorized persons selling tickets and that is the ICC CWC organization,” Mr. Jones emphasized.
He also warned fans not to purchase tickets from unscrupulous persons, who hang around venues, because of the likelihood that they would not be allowed to enter the venue after having purchased the ticket. “We do not want that to happen,” he implored.
For the person, who purchases tickets and is unable to attend the matches due to sickness among other causes, and decides to pass on the tickets to other persons, Mr. Jones said that this would not be a problem.”We decided to take a slightly different approach from FIFA World Cup Football, whereby the buyer’s name had to be on the ticket. In our case, in the opening phase, you could purchase up to eight tickets and take anybody,” he told JIS News.
“But, if there are people buying large pools of tickets under some of the packages offered, we will know that people’s generosity only goes so far,”Mr. Jones said.
He acknowledged that the ICC CWC 2007 was still trying to find a balance between preventing outright commercial transactions and persons making genuine purchases on behalf of family members and friends.
Ticket prices range from US$10 to $40 for each of the four warm-up matches at the Trelawny Multipurpose Stadium, while US$15 to US$100 for the group stage matches. For the semi-final, prices are as low as US$50 and as high as $130. For the final in Barbados, prices are between US$100 and $300.