Lottery for World Cup final tickets Lottery for World Cup final tickets

Mumbai: Tickets for the cricket World Cup final will now be sold through an online lottery after the ticketing website crashed within two hours of its opening on Monday.

Some 1,000 tickets for the 33,000-seater Wankhede Stadium were to be sold online but none of them could be bought as the website crashed due to heavy traffic.

As per contractual obligations, the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) will sell only 3,000 tickets to the public through online and window sales for the April 2 final.

Tournament secretary Ratnakar Shetty, who is also the MCA treasurer, said that the organising committee will now sell the 1,000 tickets allocated for the online sale through a lottery.

"We will also make sure that one person cannot buy more than two tickets," said Shetty.

The MCA is obligated to offer the International Cricket Council 8,500 tickets and the remaining for its club members.

World Cup final tickets to be sold via ballot

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Tickets for the Cricket World Cup final will be sold via a ballot after the official website crashed under the pressure of huge traffic.

"There will be a ballot and we're working with the BCCI (Indian cricket board) and our official online ticket agents Kyazoonga to finalise all the details. They will still be sold via the website," an ICC spokesman said.

Not a single ticket for the April 2 final to be held in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium was sold to the public after the official website went into meltdown on Monday, sparking furious complaints from fans.

"We apologise to anyone who was trying to get on but these are exceptional circumstances when 10 million people were trying to get on the website at one time," the ICC spokesman said earlier on Tuesday.

"They (Kyazoonga) were working throughout the night to get it up and running and not one ticket has been sold from the quota we had."

Of the 33,000 seats at the Wankhede, around 4,000 are available to the public -- 1,000 online while another 3,000-odd will be sold later for those who queue up at stadium box offices. The rest are distributed among the ICC and clubs affiliated to the Mumbai Cricket Association.

On Tuesday morning, the website was back up and at first glance it looked as if all the tickets had sold out since those matches were not showing up on the 'tickets for sale' schedule.

But a small message tucked on one side of the website trumpeted: "And we're back! All semis and finals tickets that are to go up on sale here are intact. Please stay tuned for further updates." Fans continued to bombard the online ticket agency's Facebook page with angry comments for the second day running.

"These guys have not done squat and no update...wow..what a bunch of bufoons (sic)," Ibaad Lari posted from Pakistan.

Another enraged fan, Rishi Dave, added: "I freakin woke up in the middle of my sleep to check if the site was working or not. since me being on Australian time i also checked the website when most of you were sleeping, BUT same as before wudnt (sic) do anything...."

"You guys are lucky you can go queue at stadium ! ... i took day off to book these tickets for final and i cant get on the site !!!!" vented Sam Saleh.

The ICC said it would reveal full details of the ballot as soon as they were finalised.

Kyazoonga grinds to a halt with World Cup 2011 tickets up for grabs

Cricket World Cup fever has gripped India and at least the cricket-playing nations. As a result Kyazoonga, the official online ICC partner to sell Cricket World Cup tickets, witnessed the fever pitch levels of support amongst cricket fans as they rushed to Kyazoonga's website to book their World Cup final tickets online. Kyazoonga has a limited number of tickets of the World Cup final in Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium up for grabs.

But Kyazoonga's servers couldn't keep pace with the massive surge of traffic the website received just a few hours earlier when the online ticket booking gates were scheduled for opening. Kyazoonga's web-server couldn't load pages quick enough for the amount of visitors it received earlier today -- it's like a DDoS attack. Naturally, Kyazoonga went down.

According to a TOI report, only 1,000 tickets of the Cricket World Cup final are being sold online (through Kyazoonga), while an additional 3,000 will be sold to fans who queue up outside the stadium's ticket counters.

Alongside the Twitter message, Kyazoonga had this to say on its official Facebook fan page:

"We are facing absolutely unprecedented amounts of traffic from all over the world, with hundreds of millions of people hitting at once. Some of you may have trouble accessing the site. It seems that cricket fever has surpassed all anticipations and expectations. Please bear with us as our global network team works on bringing you the tickets you all have been waiting for."

A lot of cricket fans who were waiting to book their World Cup final tickets online are angry and voicing their frustration on Kyazoonga's Facebook page.