Super Cup fiasco at Sabina Park

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I AM writing from the North Stand of Sabina Park where the quarter-final round of the Super Cup was played. On entering, we handed over our tickets, but no stub was returned. I protested that I would like to get my stub, as it is indeed my receipt of ticket purchase.

“No return of ticket stubs today!” was the response from the ISSA official. “But my stub is my receipt!” I retorted. “Well, you won’t be going in today, that is your choice!”

“Is that really your response to a customer?”

“Yes! You either go in without the ticket stub or you go home!”

Realising that I had, inadvertently, found myself in an argument with someone who had absolutely no concept of customer service, I decided to turn to a ISSA senior executive, who happened to be there listening to the exchange.

“Did you hear what your man just told me?” I asked the ISSA senior executive.

“Yes, I did, and he is right; there is going to be no return of ticket stubs today. You either agree to go in without a ticket stub today or you go home.” Did I just hear the ISSA senior executive repeat the same ultimatum offered to me earlier by his junior colleague?

I turned to the ISSA senior executive. “Here you are focusing on holding on the ticket stubs and depriving me of my receipt, while your system leaking like a sieve because the scalpers are having a field day outside.”

“Yes, the scalpers may be having a field day, but we are not leaking! The scalpers are under my control; they come to me and buy the tickets at $1,000 each and resell them for $1,500. We are not losing!”

Why we, the good supporters of Issa-administered sports, weren’t getting back the tickets stubs to which we were entitled. This may appear to use a hackneyed Jamaican cliché – ‘no big thing’. If there is an incident inside the stadium, how do emergency services, for example, even begin to get a proper estimate of the number of spectators inside Sabina Park? How does one prove one was even present?

The third floor bathrooms in the North Stand at Sabina Park, though, well stocked with paper and paper towels, had no water . For the double-header, only the North Stand was open.

Are the lessons of COVID-19 already forgotten? When one considers that ISSA officials are, essentially, the principals of our secondary schools, we have to admit, it nuh luk gud!

PATRICK DALLAS