Cricket Australia and Queensland Cricket have fallen short on their promise to offer all ticket-holders from the abandoned Big Bash League (BBL) cricket game last week complimentary tickets to attend this week’s day-night Test.
Last week’s BBL game between the Brisbane Heat and Sydney Thunder was hit by an energy outage that caused a loss of power to one of the light towers and a section of the stadium. The outage eventually led to the match being abandoned, causing protests from the visiting team, who had been well on course for victory.
The two organisations said attendees would be able to choose to attend one day of the Test against Sri Lanka for free in the wake of the no-result in the BBL game. However, the Brisbane Times reports that only 14,000 tickets have been released by Cricket Australia, far short of the 26,644 fans that attended Thursday’s BBL match.
“We had the allocation given to us by Cricket Australia in good faith, there were enough overs bowled (in the Big Bash game) to constitute the non-refund policy,” a Queensland Cricket spokesman said. “The allocation per day was communicated to people within 24 hours of the match ending. The spectators whose details we had were sent an email from Brisbane Heat explaining how to redeem those tickets.
“It was unfortunate for the lights to go out but it was out of the control of the stadium, Brisbane Heat and the event organisers. For the remaining Heat games and Test match… Energex will be on site and able to react quickly if something happens.”
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