Cricket fraternity in Hyderabad hits out at HCA over ticket sale mismanagement

Hyderabad: The cricket fraternity in the city was in a shock after disturbing videos of a stampede and fans being lathi-charged by police at the Gymkhana Ground started circulating on Thursday.

Former HCA officials hit out at the way the tickets were being sold without proper facilities and communication. A few also lashed at the HCA president Mohd Azharuddin for not paying heed to them and looking to run the show by himself.

HCA former secretary, Arshad Ayub said, “this is very unfortunate. This kind of lathi-charge never happened for sale of tickets in the history of Hyderabad cricket. People should ask the right question to the president. When the job of selling tickets is given to a particular agency, why did he (Azhar) announce the offline ticket sale today at Gymkhana? Why were there no barricades for the people to enter?”

HCA former secretary, T Shesh Narayan also lashed out at Azhar and said, “the incident shows how he is running the show. It is sad to see cricket fans suffer like that.”

Shesh Narayan said the chaos at Gymkhana was a result of Azhar’s dictatorship. “Till yesterday he said there were no tickets to sell. And suddenly he announced that the offline tickets sale will begin from today. How did he get tickets all of a sudden? We conducted two IPL finals here and never such an incident happened.”

The advice of seniors in the association, who had the experience of conducting matches in the past, was not being sought, he said and referring to Azharuddin, added, “he is acting on his own and is responsible for what happened. It was horrible to see such scenes at Gymkhana.”

Telangana Cricket Association (TCA) secretary Dharam Guruva Reddy called for prosecution of Azhar. “It is a simple task to sell tickets online with full transparency. It is the responsibility of the HCA to inform general public about the availability of online purchase of tickets well in advance. But Azhar created a situation of chaos, confusion and illegally issued a letter overnight announcing the tickets availability without taking necessary precautions,” he said.

Another club secretary pointed out, “there is no clarity on how many tickets are going on sale and how many are complementary. We club secretaries are yet to receive our quota of passes. Where did all these tickets go?”