Counting conundrum: How full is houseful?

KOCHI: It is five minutes past the hour mark and Kervens Belfort races down the left flank on a counter, does a step over that fools Ruben Rocha and pokes it past a furious Antonio Doblas to send the home crowd bouncing, out of boundless joy. A few minutes before the Haitian striker had put Kerala Blasters ahead against Delhi Dynamos in the first leg of the semifinal last Sunday, the packed Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was showing signs of frustration with the home side missing an array of chances. By around the same time the two big screens inside the venue flashed the attendance for the evening, which showed 49,659. The number was roundly booed and fans in the galleries were seen looking over each other's shoulders as if attempting a headcount.

The ground was visibly full and incidentally, a week ago, when thousands of fans with tickets were denied entry as the authorities proclaimed the venue to be 'houseful', the attendance was given as 53,767. The fans simply couldn't believe the figures. Kerala Blasters striker Duckens Nazon had tweeted a 180-degree video of the gallery with a footnote that read: "Amazing! Kerala Blasters fans almost 80,000 tonight. Thanks for the support." The Haitian could be excused for going overboard, but his teammate Michael Chopra, who was also part of the team the first season, could not be too wrong. The Englishman said he thought it was at least 65,000 that night.

"Do they think we are fools?" fumed Ajay Daas, a fan. "It surely looked more than 49,000. Could've been close to 60k," tweeted another football fan, Deepesh Salhotra. The Nehru Stadium had registered highest attendances in excess of 61,000 in the first two seasons of the ISL. The organisers informed that the capacity this year has been reduced to 55,000 as they point to the cordoned areas on the second tier behind the two goalposts. It is being rumoured that the attendance figures were fudged as the organisers were forced to show numbers less than the advertised capacity, naturally. But no one seems to know how the organisers arrived at the numbers.

"We count the counterfoils from the gate receipts," said a Kerala Blasters official, who conceded that they do not scan the tickets. However, the city police have told this newspaper that they believe there might be issues of 'ticketless entries', as they couldn't find any other explanation for the fans, with tickets, who were told that their seats were already taken. So it means, the attendance could've actually been in excess of 60,000, even though the official numbers suggest something else. Kochi has hosted 3,91,941 supporters in its eight matches this season and that is 70 per cent more than the attendance at the Indira Gandhi Athletic Stadium in Guwahati, the home of the NorthEast United, which was the second most popular venue this season. Though the Kerala Football Association, which shares the stadium with the Kerala Cricket Association, and the Greater Cochin Development Authority that owns the stadium, have said that the capacity for ISL-3 was decided as 55,000, both parties could not confirm that it was not possible to count seats in the galleries that do not have chairs. The issue is complex.