The match would happen in a pop-up stadium seating 34,000 and set for post-Cup disassembly and departure, at the sporting wee hour of 10:30 a.m., in a park bigger than Central with two golf courses and an outdoor concert venue named for Harry Chapin and a New York Islanders training facility. It would happen in a map dot of fervor surrounded by the American general obliviousness. Yet as the world’s largest (India) and fifth-largest (Pakistan) populations set to watch from afar, two Indian men from Ahmedabad now based in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, had a reading of global mania in their hands.
It read $1,636 Canadian dollars each (about $1,187 U.S.)
Don’t forget the service fee.
How about $4,183 (Canadian) for two?
Parth Shah and Digvijay Vaghela had bought too-good-to-be-true tickets on Facebook marketplace, and those tickets had not scanned, so now Shah researched, giving an onlooker a glimpse at his scrolling just after he had said, “It is madness.”
While prices had dipped from outrageous to somewhat less outrageous in recent weeks, he narrated the moment of Sunday morning: “It’s only going up right now as we’re getting closer to the game. And you can see there’s still the same amount of tickets.” Speaking of the third-party ticket distributors of the planet, he said, “The problem is they know whoever’s in the two-hour radius, they’ll still buy it. They’re getting the bigger fish out of the way now.”
He and Vaghela stood next to a hut with signs reading “TICKET OFFICE” and “NO ONSITE TICKET SALES.”
“We get that they have to make money,” Shah said of those making money. “But for a cricket fan, it’s disheartening.”
They have tickets for other matches here, but India vs. Pakistan in the world’s second-biggest sport never falls into any category resembling “other matches.” Its allure owes heavily to its rarity, and its rarity owes heavily to the hard feelings and harder border between two governments. The two generally need something like a World Cup to get together. When tickets opened for sale, tickets closed for sale two minutes thereafter as screens froze around the globe.
“I think for a lot of Indians, and for a lot of Pakistanis I’m sure, it’s a bucket-list, like once-in-a-lifetime experience to watch India versus Pakistan, especially with this being a World Cup, said Kiran Kunnur, who hails from Bangalore and resides in San Francisco. “And it’s not just about cricket. There’s a lot of political drama associated with India versus Pakistan, and I think a lot of people associate the cricket match with all of that.”
The firm border, he agreed, helps stoke the curiosity once the peoples do get to mingle on the other sides of the world.
He paid about $1,100 for his good seat.
“Basically, this event, they tried to promote cricket in America,” said Abid Mahmood, who with wife Shanaz wore their Pakistan shirts after traveling from Birmingham, England. “The stadium holds 34,000 seats. Seventeen thousand, half of the tickets, go straight to the sponsors. So for the other remaining 17,000, 2 million applications got in for those 17,000. That’s how big this game is.”
He said he had 28 friends and family members apply. None got accepted, but he found two through a contact.
Said Ammar Ahmed, a native of Karachi based in Orlando, “Nobody that I know personally got the [lottery]. My friends back in Pakistan, my friends in Dubai, nobody got it.” His brother Sohaib added, “We made everybody [they know] sign up.”
So they scrolled, as did Sachit Bolisetty of Chicago, who had paid $800 for a ticket with a pdf format only to learn the gate wasn’t taking pdf formats. He tried to check with the vendor. Others wondered about breaking off toward watch parties at the Mets’ Citi Field or at One World Trade Center.
Some, meanwhile, had scrambled together plans in just the past 24 hours. That’s how Amit Sharma of Nashville, Aman Thakur of Chicago and Aditya Chauhan of Toronto wound up together at 7-ish a.m. on the shuttle bus from the Westbury train station on the Long Island Railroad.
“Of course,” Sharma wrote in a text from inside the stadium, “there wouldn’t be a bigger opportunity to grab a game between India and Pakistan anywhere in the world and it happening in the U.S. was just another good opportunity that we didn’t want to miss.”
And so: “There was little hesitation as the tickets were quite high. We had maybe an hour or two max to make a decision. I picked up the phone and called Aman and told him that it was not going to happen again anytime soon and that too in the US. We booked the game tickets and the flight tickets right away and flew to NYC. Aman did the same thing by calling his brother in law, Aditya and convincing him as well.”
Their tickets cost $1,000 each.
“Yes, quite expensive,” Sharma wrote, fully aware of how many lives everyone gets to live.
Meantime, the scrollers fought two other issues outside: The WiFi had started to stall amid the crowds, and the drizzle had started to fall amid the morning.