Pandemonium reigned at the Arima Velodrome yesterday as hundreds of people lined up for tickets to today’s vital World Cup qualifier between T&T and Bahrain.
Fans waited from as early as 4 am to buy their tickets.
At 9.10 am, tickets at the venue were sold out.
A police officer later confirmed this, but the message was not passed on to the crowd.
The number of police on hand seemed inadequate to handle the massive crowd.
Several confrontations arose as some people tried to jump barricades set up to maintain an orderly line.
At one point, a police officer gun-butted a man as he attempted to jump the barricade.
Two mounted police also lashed out at individuals attempting to break the line.
One sergeant assigned to the St Joseph police station blamed the organisers for the meagre police presence.
“The T&T Football Federation are to blame. They were disorganised from the beginning,” the officer, who wished not to be named, said.
“Police officers from Port-of-Spain were supposed to be providing protection here. Only after the crowd started forming we were called.”
Limited police presence at the Arima Stadium was not the only problem.
There was no ambulance present to attend to those who fainted.
The barricades to maintain the lines were weak at times as swelling crowds caused them to topple over more than once.
Traffic around the stadium moved at a slow pace for most of the morning.
Up to 1.30 pm, the crowd was still thick and several of the ticket seekers were visibly irritated.
“This is nonsense. I can’t believe tickets could sell out in 35 to 40 minutes. How much tickets they send to Arima? I feel they send two KFC box-ful of tickets to sell,” an Arima resident said.
T&T Football Federation’s marketing manager, Peter O’Connor, confirmed that the tickets did sell out early yesterday.
O’Connor could not say how many tickets were distributed to each stadium.
He directed all questions on the number of tickets distributed to Concacaf representative Roy Augustus.
Augustus is in charge of security for the match.
He said: “What went on at the venues was simply a major demand that the supply could not handle.”
Augustus refused to comment on the specific times that tickets were sold out at the different venues.
A source from the local organising committee said 5,000 tickets were allotted to Arima.