The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) President Sourav Ganguly has picked Mumbai, Bengaluru and Gujarat as the venues for the next pink-ball Tests in India.
“We will have to work towards that. It just gets people interested to come,” Hindustan Times quoted Ganguly as saying on Saturday.
“I didn’t think there would be so many people. I thought we would get good crowds, but not so many. We sold 15 tickets every minute. When our ticket-booking partners put up tickets online, they were sold out in two hours. That’s when we realised, this is big,” the BCCI president added.
Ganguly also said that earlier a venue used to host only one or two matches and that was a major reason crowd filled the stands. With the advent of the Indian Premier League, the major cricket centres generally get 8-9 matches a year and thus the interest among the fans tend to take a dip.
“The team took it well. They were taken in by the people who came to watch. There were 60,000 people for Test cricket. It was like when we played and there were a lakh watching that (2001, Eden Gardens) Test against Australia. But at that time there was no T20. Kolkata had one game a year. Now it has nine games – seven IPL matches, one ODI and one Test match; so people have started choosing,” Ganguly said.
In India’s first-ever pink-ball Test match, which was played under the floodlight of the Eden Gardens, the Indian pacers had run through the Bangladeshi team to win the historic tie in the first session of the third day by an innings and 46 runs.