So the Qatar Local Organising Committee is happy with the crowd chaos that erupted outside Khalifa Stadium on Saturday night? That’s what spokesman Jassim Al-Rumaihi recently said, blaming latecomers for the crowd control fiasco which forced more than 700 legitimate ticket holders to miss the match.
“In general I am very happy with what we have done,” Al-Rumaihi told reporters in the aftermath of the chaos. “There are some issues that have been raised and we will consider it as we have a lot of events coming up like the World Cup.”
The casual understatement doesn’t explain why the Asian Football Confederation has decided to refund the cost of tickets to those fans unable to get inside Khalifa Stadium to watch the match.
“Once again, we apologise to these fans, and have decided in conjunction with the AFC to refund all ticket-holders who have been denied access to the venue due to security closure of gates,” a press release from the QLOC said.
Fat lot of good refunding $10 tickets does for fans who spent thousands to fly in from Australia and Japan, not to mention the locals who also missed out on watching the showpiece event.
Video footage taken outside the ground shows well-armed security personnel patrolling locked gates – which eyewitnesses say shut more than 35 minutes before kick-off – as distraught fans wave matchday tickets in the face of disinterested authorities.
“We always say go back, buy your ticket, try to come earlier and they still come the same way,” Al-Rumaihi told reporters in the aftermath to the chaos.
“They should plan this earlier so that they come to the stadium with no hassle. I wish from my heart this didn’t happen but we can’t sell tickets more than the capacity of the stadium,” he said.
The problem is that they didn’t sell more tickets than the capacity of the stadium.
Concerned by the prospect of empty seats, eyewitnesses say authorities simply threw open the gates to let bystanders in for free.
When legitimate ticket holders did show up, they were informed the ground was full and denied entry, and the whole problem was exacerbated by the arrival of Qatar’s Al-Thani royal family.
That the arrival of dignitaries took precedence over the safety of supporters speaks volumes for the contempt Asian football fans are often held in.
It seems fans are either viewed as docile cash-cows or completely irrelevant, by men who spend their days being whisked from five-star hotels to the comfort of a private box without a care for those who’ve paid good money to be there.
We’ve seen it in the decision to hold a one-off AFC Champions League final in neutral Tokyo for the past two years – how many Zob Ahan fans did end up travelling from Iran? – and we’ve seen it in the short shrift AFC officials regularly give the media.
CNN correspondent James Montague told me he was given the runaround by the Qatari FA in his quest to line up an interview, while my own attempts to talk to someone in Doha about the 2022 World Cup were summarily ignored.
And with Australia hosting the 2015 Asian Cup, the pampered elite will soon be rolling into town and expecting the local media to toe the party line.
Fortunately things don’t quite work that way down under, and regular complaints about security firm Hatamoto aside, crowd control is a far more organised affair.
It’s a shame the Asian Cup ended on a sour note, but hopefully the AFC learns from the fiasco and starts treating fans with some respect.
If they don’t, they can get used to the sight of empty stadia because fans affected by these the kind of chaos we saw on Saturday are unlikely to return.
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