When thousands of fans queued up for opening ceremony tickets across Dhaka and while Shoaib Akhtar was speaking his heart out in Sheraton, the big news was of the national cricketers being stranded in Chittagong yesterday. That the World Cup has truly arrived was further reaffirmed when the England cricket team arrived to play two warm-up games.
According to our Chittagong correspondent, the Bangladesh and Canada cricket teams waited for more than two hours at the Shah Amanat International Airport after the Bangladesh Biman aircraft experienced a glitch forcing the cricketers and other passengers to get off the plane after it taxied off around 11:55am.
Though the BG022 flight eventually took off at 2:15pm, Biman’s station manager Abul Kashem said that the plane was at the edge of the runway when the crew realised the malfunction. “As it was about to take-off at the edge of the runway, the flight crews stopped it noticing some technical fault,” he said.
Rumours circulated all afternoon but eventually the cricketers arrived in Dhaka, but without five players of the Canada side who were too perturbed by the experience. They took a separate Regent Airways flight at 2:00pm, arranged by the local organisers.
Chaos returned to the streets of the capital yesterday as Dhaka Bank began selling tickets for the World Cup’s opening ceremony to be held on February 17.
The Bangladesh Cricket Board informed that 9,700 tickets were equally distributed to ten branches of the private bank and though the sale will run till the day of the event, it is predicted that most of it has been sold out. There were irregularities in several branches as people were being given only one ticket per person when it was stated that one person can buy a maximum of two tickets.
Early in the morning, Pakistan cricketers Younis Khan, Umar Gul, Shoaib Akhtar and Misbahul Haq made their assertions for the World Cup with the Rawalpindi Express proclaiming that the dangerous side are hurting from the spot-fixing ordeal that resulted in three players being suspended.
The Andrew Strauss-led England arrived in town and have also declared their stake on the trophy, sensing his team has an “excellent chance”.
