On being C92 at the Cricket World Cup ticket office

54-46 may or may not have been Toots Hibbert’s actual prisoner ID number, but I’m sticking by mine: C92. My prison is only metaphorical, of course: the CWC World Cup ticket office at the Hasely Crawford Stadium, where I sit now on a concrete staircase waiting for the ticket office people to open the door again so the 40 or 50 of us gathered here can start screaming at them once more. Well, not really screaming. More like clamouring for information that should have been given to us long ago, or at least posted on a wall somewhere, and for one of those squares of paper with a number hand-written on it. (Too bad I don’t have a Sharpie in my bag — I could have done a roaring trade in bootleg number-papers.)

Problem is, nobody knows what the numbers mean. “What time will C92 be called?” I asked the security guard. She shrugged and gave a non-answer about the tickets not having yet arrived. The saleswoman who handed out the first batch of number-papers did so with the speed and furtiveness of a drug pusher distributing gram-bags on a street corner. The next tranch was delivered by the security guard, who simply stuck a hand holding a stack of them through the grille. A man whom I’d seen slink into the ticketing area only minutes before was on hand to grab them. “Hey you!” I shouted. “I was was here long before you!” “Hold strain, hold strain,” he said, struggling to separate the tiny squares, which were loosely held together with a bent paper clip. When C92 finally reached me, the clip was still attached. I think I’ll keep it as a souvenir.

It’s now 11:16 am, which means I’ve been here nearly 45 minutes. The big orange sign on the door (still closed) says that opening hours are 8am to 4pm. I can’t say I blame the salespeople for shutting the door and hiding out. Nothing they can tell the crowd will make the us happy. They don’t seem to have either the information, or our tickets, and the supervisor is AWOL, as supervisors tend to be at times like these. Some of the people waiting here ordered their tickets online since November, which makes me feel only a little less peeved (I ordered mine–for the warm-up match between South Africa and Pakistan–two days ago).

As usual, there’s an apologist in the crowd, a self-righteous woman with permanently pursed lips who, in spite of the fact that she arrived here even earlier than me, keeps telling everybody to behave and to “use their common sense”. “It’s an international tournament,” she tells a man, a shortish middle-management type in shirt-and-tie and boots with heels just a little too high. “What do people expect?” I decide to ignore her, as earlier, in response to my comment about the lack of information, she’d pointed to a sign on the wall and retorted, “But all the information is there.” I decided that pointing out to her that the sign was the standard one posted in all the ticket offices since last year, bearing the standard info, and that we wouldn’t all be standing here bitching had things been working according to plan, would have been a colossal waste of time.

A nuts man* has entered the area, doing a brisk trade as it’s nearly lunch time. A couple of men sitting on the steps in front of me are saying, in that classic Trini style, that it’s a good thing we got “only the brown** matches”. “Look, the construction at the Oval ain’t even finish,” one says. They guffaw.

They’ve just opened the door, and I was about to pack up and join the knot of people in front of it, if only to find out what being number C92 means. But a man in a plaid shirt tells me it’s only for those purchasing tickets, not collectors of online orders. So seems I won’t be budging for a while. But the concrete’s getting a little hard now.

*peanut vendor
**early round

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