Cricket World Cup Magic – Half Of Stadium Crowd Disappears!

National Holiday Declared In Antigua For CWC Game

Local School Children Given Tickets At Last Moment

CWC Stadium Half Empty Anyway

Oh oh!

West Indies vs. Australia in Antigua. National Holiday declared for the Cricket World Cup game.

Brand new Vivian Richards Cricket Ground less than half full.

Lots of “if this, if that” comments from Cricket World Cup people and politicians. Local CWC organising committee says “satisfied” with attendance through gritted teeth.

How many hundreds of millions of dollars spent to get to this point?

Take a good look at that photo, my friends.

It might have happened in Antigua, but Barbados and everyone else will be paying for those empty seats for decades.

Prediction For Barbados: Free & Cut-Rate Tickets To Fill The Stands

There is NO WAY that the Barbados government would ever allow empty stands for CWC games held on the island. One way or another, those Barbados stands will be packed.

Keep your ears open for free and cut rate tickets or batches of tickets given to church and youth groups by mysterious, anonymous donors.

Full stands in Barbados are a given. The real questions are how they got full, and what it really means as an indicator of success or failure for Cricket World Cup in Barbados.

From The Nation News…

Crowd Shortfall

CRICKET WORLD CUP (CWC) matches appear to be attracting less than the anticipated bumper crowds.

Yesterday’s first match of the Super 8s stage between CWC hosts West Indies and World Cup favourites Australia in Antigua was expected to be a near “sell-out”. The turn-out of spectators painted a different picture however.

On a day that was declared a national holiday to mark the inaugural international match at the new Vivian Richards Cricket Ground, the stadium was nowhere close to its 19 000 capacity.

A generous, unofficial count was around 13 000.

This followed some low spectator numbers at some first-round matches at Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad, Sabina Park in Jamaica and Warner Park in St Kitts…

… continue reading this story at The Nation News (link here)

Barbados Free Press Under Hack Attack Again

Hi Folks

BFP is under electronic attack (again) so some of your comments are being delayed as we are dealing with several thousand spam in the last 24 hours – as well as some more sophisticated hack attempts.

We are not sure if this is a targeted attack against BFP or if it is a result of our new visitor numbers just attracting new spam engines. The blog entered new territory this month with the number of new visitors up 50% compared to February.

It looks like we have hit some sort of critical mass.

Anyway – we’re working on it and George will be back tomorrow. (George the a really really old guy who helps us by faithfully sorting through the spam during the daytime) 😉

Thanks, George!