Locals show lack of interest in Games

A lot of people live in Delhi, about 12.2 million of them in fact, 22 million if you include some of the satellite cities that have been swallowed up as the Indian capital's girth has increased.

Everywhere you look, the city teems with humanity, whether it be on the streets, in the markets, crammed into tenements or going about their daily business in the mostly well-hidden slums.

Everywhere apart from the Commonwealth Games venues that is.

The Games were opened to rows upon rows of empty seats.

The pool, which is usually a cacophony of noise from start to finish at the Olympics, was deathly quiet during the opening day's heats.

That's perhaps understandable, but the pitiful crowd for the finals was more difficult to explain away.

You could have sprayed a Gatling gun around the hockey venue with little fear of finding yourself on a murder charge, while a club game in New Zealand would attract a bigger crowd than that the Silver Ferns played in front of.

Believe it or not, that crowd, at the Thyagaraj Stadium had swollen from the number that had watched the Australians in the day's first match.

"Once you're on the court you never worry about who's in the crowd," said Australian coach Norma Plummer. Which is just as well really because, in this case, there was not a lot to worry about.

Sport doesn't necessarily need an audience, but it helps.

There are several reasons why the uptake has been so poor.

The Games have been mired in controversy for the past six weeks and those who were contemplating investing in tickets have possibly been put off. Certainly, there are far fewer overseas visitors to Delhi for the Games than had been anticipated when they were given the green light in 2003.

Still, there are more than enough Indians to fill the stadia many times over and most of them would have remained immune to the horror stories that were filling the column inches in the lead-up to the event.

Real sports fans probably care little for the state of the Games village and the allegations of corruption among officials, though they might baulk at the prospect of venues collapsing around them as seemed a possibility when the pictures emerged of the twisted footbridge.

Price could be another factor. Disposable income is not prevalent among the majority of Indians, although the ticket prices appear reasonable through Western eyes.

Tickets for individual sports range between 50-1000 rupees. When you consider that the exchange rate is more than 30 rupees to the NZ dollar the prices appear competitive - though when mentioning this within earshot of some locals at a restaurant this week, one of our party was gently rebuked for applying Western standards of living to an Indian event.

Even so, there are plenty of Indian people who can afford it and they're still not coming.

Exact information is almost impossible to come by, but some estimates have just 250,000 of the 1.7 million available tickets being sold.

Like everything else surrounding these Games, ticket sales have not been helped by technical gremlins.

Buyers could not buy tickets online during the first round of sales because of a "glitch", when the system crashed.

The final, most unpalatable explanation could be the complete indifference Indians have for the sport on offer. Give them a T20 cricket match between Mumbai and Kolkata and they'll queue for miles. A couple of septuagenarian lawn bowlers sedately battling it out - not so much.

Hockey, evidently, has been the hottest ticket in town, but most of those tickets have been sold for the one match, India versus Pakistan on Sunday.

Sevens was popular in Melbourne, but unless there's a late run on the tickets, it will not be in Delhi.

As far as the athletes are concerned, you can only hope that empty stadiums don't leave hollow feelings.