The Eden Gardens is all decked up, overlooked by the newly installed LED lights in its towers, as it gets ready to host its first international game of 2023.
Though final touches in some parts of the stadium would only be complete before the ODI World Cup in October, Thursday’s India-Sri Lanka game at the venue is still set to be a grand affair.
Even though the Lankans are not amongst the cricketing elites at the moment, giving rise to speculation about their ability to give a strong Indian team a tough fight in the 50-over format, the Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) remains optimistic about filling up most of the seats in the 67,000-capacity stadium.
Early evening on Monday, one could see a sizeable gathering in front of the gates marked for counter sales of match tickets. With Monday also being the last date for collecting life membership tickets, one witnessed a long queue at the ‘L’ block for renewal of the life membership cards.
And as one proceeded to collect the membership tickets from gate numbers 5 and 6, one could also see the touts roaming nearby. It’s a familiar picture before every international game that the Eden stages and it’s no different this time around.
“Ticket sales, both online and offline, have crossed 15,000 and will increase further. With still two more days left for the game, we expect a sizeable number of tickets to be sold out.
“Even if there’s no capacity crowd, we expect the turnout to reach 50,000 at least,” CAB president Snehasish Ganguly said.
In order to ensure the spectators remain entertained right through, the association will be putting up a laser show during the innings break.
“The laser show will be a six-minute affair during the innings break when players won’t be out to practise (ahead of the second half). We’ve taken permission from the BCCI beforehand,” Snehasish said.
Former BCCI president and India captain Sourav Ganguly is set to be present during the game, as will be former CAB chief Avishek Dalmiya, who’s now in the IPL governing council.
Will anyone among the BCCI bigwigs turn up? “We have sent invitations to all BCCI office-bearers, but the president (Roger Binny) said he won’t be available,” Snehasish stated. “The secretary (Jay Shah) has confirmed his presence verbally.”
Sri Lankan legend Kumar Sangakkara, who’s also in the commentary team, is likely to ring the Eden Bell before the game starts.
As far as the renovation work is concerned, the dressing rooms and the corporate boxes in blocks ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘K’ and ‘L’ will be undergoing an overhaul.
“The chairs in the Club House lower-tier have already been changed and before the IPL, we plan to change the upper-tier chairs as well with bucket seats,” Ganguly said.
