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Where to sit at the BNS?

Sports Reporter
sThe Bangladesh Football \ W 1 Federation (BFF) has decided to disburse 17,500 tickets per match day as complimentary tickets, leaving only 5,500 seats for general spectators during the SAFF Championship.
The spectators' drought at the 23,000-capaticy Bangabandhu National Stadium (BNS) may have prompted the BFF higher-ups to take the decision to distribute almost 75 per cent of the tickets to its stakeholders -such as District Football Associations, clubs from the Bangladesh Premier League and Pioneer Football League, BFF executive members, government officials and sponsors - in an attempt to fill up the Big Bowl and provide the home team with significant backing.
The game's local governingbody may also have kept the spectators' dwindling interest in local football in mind before fixing the prices of the tickets; seats at the gallery cost Tk 20, while the VIP gallery
costs Tk 50. However, they have seemingly not thought of seating arrangements for the spectators.
The present condition of the BNS is miserable, especially in the galleries where the chairs are completely unusable and there are hardly any open spaces from where one can enjoy the match, barring the VIP galleries and a part of the western gallery.
The majority of chairs in the galleries have been long damaged since being installed seven years ago, when Bangladesh co-hosted the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup. The condition of the chairs in the gallery were so poor that the National Sports Council (NSC) uprooted approximately 5,500 chairs during the opening ceremony of February's first-ever Bangladesh Youth Games, which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina attended as chief guest.
The Youth Games were completed long ago but the BNS remains in dire straits although it was announced last year that Bangladesh would host the SAFF Championship. The NSC did
some renovation work at the BNS ahead of the upcoming event, but they did not take any initiatives to either replace those chairs or uproot the damaged ones to clear some space for spectators.
"We agree that the gallery is in no condition to watch matches from. We should think of the comfort of the spectators and we will immediately take the measures to replace those chairs," said BFF senior vice president Abdus Salam Murshedy, who is also the chairman of the Local Organising Committee of SAFF, at a press conference at the BFF House yesterday.
Although it is the NSC's responsibility to maintain the BNS, a source within it said that the BFF did not demand that they make space available for spectators; something the Bangladesh Olympic Association did during the Youth Games.
"We have renovated two international dressing rooms and furnished two more dressing rooms with new equipment. We have also installed nearly 350 new floodlights as per BFF's requirements. However, they never
raised the issue of damaged chairs," said an NSC official, admitting that only chairs at the VIP galleries were useable.
It should be mentioned here that a 100-crore-taka renovation of the stadium is in the works, the plans for which were sent to the planning ministry in mid-August for approval. As a decision has not been taken over that project, there is hesitation to begin any work on the stadium.
The complimentary distribution of 75 per cent of the tickets also raised questions of how the game's governing body will handle increased demand from the general public should Bangladesh start to get success in group-stage matches.
"We will soon sit to revise our decision of disbursing complimentary tickets but we have distributed complimentary tickets before too," said Murshedy.
The tickets for the SAFF Championship will be sold from today at the BFF House, Dhaka Metropolis Football League Committee office at BNS and two BNS booths.