High price to pay for Ashes tickets
28th September, 2006
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As half the nation fling themselves at the gates of our great cricket grounds this summer, desperate for a glimpse of the Ashes matches, there will be heartbreak. A few thousand people who have shelled out for tickets will find themselves barred. They will have been guilty of no greater crime than buying tickets from scalpers - a situation some find loathsome but that may simply be an inevitable product of a society in which most problems can be solved with the application of money.
I understand the arguments against scalpers but I fail to see exactly what it is that's so bad about buying second-hand tickets. How come a ticket is almost the only thing you can own but not be allowed to on-sell? And, with a nod to all those who believe scalpers unfairly drive up the prices of seats, deny children the opportunity to see their heroes and hurt the poor, doesn't it seem weird that the free market has been locked out of the country's best cricket grounds? This is a sport in which players earn massive salaries, sponsors pay enormous fees, media groups make huge profits, crowds are forced to shell out ridiculous amounts for beverages...and yet somehow it's wrong for the laws of supply and demand to operate at the fans' level. Surely if someone is rich, desperate and willing enough to pay a vastly inflated sum for a seat, there shouldn't be anything to stop him. If people are enterprising enough to flog their tickets for a profit, there shouldn't be any real problem with that either. You can sell anything you own in this country. Why not your cricket tickets? It's a bogus argument to claim scalpers were locking true fans out of the game - those stands have been chock-full or half-empty in recent seasons, depending on the stature of the teams playing and the strength of their game. Scalpers were as affected by those conditions as anyone else, making good money on big games, not so much on others. The cricket authorities have already forced us into their vile, upright seating enclosures with nothing but distant memories of a time when a day at the cricket meant dozing on the grass. They have effectively killed that other old tradition of rolling up to the ground on a whim and waiting until a ticket presented itself. What's more, they have left us with no other option than to hang about on their (pretty slack) booking website, taking some sort of weird cyberspace gamble for the chance to buy a place at a match. So now cricket fans are wheeling and dealing in a new secondary market - one of grace and favour. The rich and well-connected are wheedling their way into corporate boxes and sucking up to those with members' passes. (And even the members aren't guaranteed their seats this season - we have a serious problem when I'm forced to feel sympathy for the members.) The marginally well off, who'd pay anything to see just one game, really don't have much chance of seeing anything. An acquaintance who missed out on Gabba tickets but was willing to go interstate now realises that even if he can buy tickets somewhere else, the cricketing authorities will deny him entry at the gate. And the rest of the fans - who, like most people, don't have a lot of money to throw around, don't know where to start looking for corporate-box entry and think the members' stand exists for comedy relief - just aren't going. Funny how this crackdown really seems to be concentrated on the Ashes. I don't recall a whole lot of problems getting in to see the one-day final against Sri Lanka in February. Couldn't be that the powerbrokers of Cricket Australia are jealous of anyone but themselves making a quid out of the biggest game in town, could it? |
