What happened to first come, first serve?
It is difficult to see, at least on the face of it, how a luck-and-chance system via a mobile phone makes the distribution of tickets for Trinidad and Tobago's farewell friendly against Peru any more equitable.
Inevitably, there is a lot of attention focussed on the significant hike in prices for the game on May 10, but that is all about testing the value of a premier product at a time when the country is enjoying unprecedented levels of overall wealth, even if the rising tide of petrodollars has done very little to lift significant segments of the population out of poverty and desperation.
In an ideal system, there would have been established long ago a database of fans who regularly patronise the game at all levels-club competitions, age-group tournaments, full internationals-and those regulars, and not the fly-by-night variety like myself, would be accorded significant discounts by virtue of their proven commitment to supporting football.
We would all like to believe that the Football Federation and their commercial partners are genuinely concerned about die-hard fans, the ones who turn up when no-one else does, being unable to afford the $300 (far less the $500) for the game. But this is business.
They must have assessed the market, put a value on a national team that has made history in qualifying for the World Cup football finals for the first time ever, and will expect to be vindicated by a full-house at the Hasely Crawford Stadium.
It may be brutal and unfair for some of the real supporters to be left out on the basis of their low incomes while hordes of never-see-come-see executive types with their Motorola Razrs, their sunglasses on the tops of their heads and their painted faces fill the stands. But, as we will no doubt be reminded, international sport is an extremely expensive business and could never be sustained on subsidised pricing.
Just to confirm that the TTFF weren't going overboard in attempting to make the most of the hottest property around, I checked FIFA's World Cup website yesterday, which revealed that ticket prices for Trinidad and Tobago's three Group "B" games range from (and this is TT$) $273 for a seat directly behind the goal to $780 for a prime position on the half-line.
So the pricing seems to be in keeping with what prevails generally at international level. However, isn't it also still the norm to have a significant number of tickets available for direct sale at various points?
Almost everywhere that I know of (First World, Third World, is there a Second World?), people line up to buy tickets for every major event.
Depending on the level of demand and degree of public hype, there is almost always an element of chaos. But in an orderly, disciplined society, the early birds get the tickets and the late-comers are left at the mercy of the scalpers.
Why is it necessary to have a mobile phone hooked up with one of the sponsors to be entitled to go into a draw for the chance to buy tickets?
What safeguards and assurances are there to ensure that the draw for the allocation of ticket-purchasing privileges on April 25 is entirely random?
It may be a way out of the bacchanal that prevails at ticket booths here, but the system, at least as we have been informed so far, still seems open to manipulation while the general public will be none the wiser.
But, then again, we have gotten what we deserved.
Just a simple thing like lining up and respecting the time-honoured principle of first come, first serve is too much to ask in these parts. You almost have to call out the Defence Force, not to kidnap anybody, but to keep people from breaking the line, barging through the polite, patient few and almost assaulting the poor individual in the ticket booth.
"Lining up is for ants, man," some idiot will say as all hell breaks loose.
It is a depressingly familiar situation that is not helped by big companies and career scalpers sending their functionaries in the same line to buy so many hundred tickets in which row and which section, thereby delaying what should be a simple, straightforward process that invariably results in most of the tickets being sold to very few people.
It is really all about a culture of indiscipline, selfishness and expedience, a conviction that whatever I need to do is justified and to hell with the consequences, so long as I get what I want.
It is a modus operandi not limited to the poor masses, even if their reactions are more obvious, but is also typical of the wheeling and dealing mentality that prevails in the upper echelons of this decaying society.
So I suppose the authorities can't really be blamed for trying to find a way to avoid that sort of stupidness, it's just that it seems so unsatisfactory to have it tied in with a commercial partner. And, by the way, if it is so high-tech and failsafe, how come you have to pay cash in an era of debit and credit cards?
Never mind. Even if I am around at the time and want to go to the game, I don't know how to send a text. Funny though, that I don't feel devalued as a human being by what many would consider to be an embarrassing admission.