http://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/it-is-no-good-waiting-for-someone-to-die-before-making-decisions-20100201-n8ym.html
PAKISTAN'S Sports Minister Aijaz Hussain Jakhrani has urged Cricket Australia to set up barriers at grounds and ban alcohol following the tackle by a spectator on Khalid Latif in Perth on Sunday night.
"The thing that really worried me, what if that person had a knife on him, he got there and could have done anything he wanted," Jakhrani told the Herald. "They should ban alcohol at grounds. There should be some kind of barrier or restriction to stop people entering the ground. This is the right time to think about these things. It is no good waiting for someone to die before making decisions."
Grounds in the subcontinent have barbed-wire fences dividing players from spectators, which has prevented the ground invasions that are frustratingly common during the Australian summer.
Mr Jakhrani who is of course acting in the interests of safety for his players, I think has entirely the right spirit. There should be a stronger deterrent to stop people from entering the field of play. However, the suggestion to erect barriers is in my opinion quite dangerous.
21 years ago when Liverpool played Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup Semi Final, 96 people were killed in a crowd crush in the now world infamous Hillsborough Stadium Tragedy. The subsequent Taylor Report which was commissioned into the disaster actually pointed to the crowd barriers among other things* as a root cause of the disaster in the first place. If there was a crowd crush in a stadium with "barbed-wire fences dividing players from spectators" as perhaps the Herald as implied, then I for one would not wish to be within 25 meters of said fence.
Apart from the 96 people who died, another 766 people were injured and around 300 people were hospitalised. One shudders to think what would happen under such circumstances if you then introduce barbed-wire into the mix.
Certainly I agree with the sentiment that crowd security and player safety should be looked into because this is quite a prudent thing to do, but introducing measures which in other circumstances which have proved to be fatal, might well be a price which is simply unbearable.
Having said this, the recommendations which came out of the Taylor Report are worth revisiting, for the administrators of any sporting code where they expect large numbers of people to be seated in a relatively small area, but I would have expected this as part of the normal review process.
There is of course the other question about banning alcohol at cricket matches. One thing to bear in mind is that Mr Jakhrani represents the interests of an Islamic nation, and as such the consumption of alcoholic beverages by Muslims is officially illegal in Pakistan, so I don't quite know if this is a backhanded method of enforcing Islamic values on the West.
Most major sporting venues in Australia either prohibit the bringing of alcohol into the venue, and also have as part of their licencing agreements and regulations, both the responsible service of and a prohibition of removal of alcohol.
At any rate, the 37-year-old man who tackled Khalid Latif to the ground has not actually been charged with drunkenness, but with the more serious charges of assault and trespass and has also won himself a life ban from the WACA Ground.
Perhaps the best thing in this case would be a punitive fine of $10,000 for invading the pitch: this seems to work quite effectively in both Sydney and Melbourne. But the idea of erecting a potentially lethal barrier around the pitch itself, I think should be killed here and now.
*The recommendations of the Taylor Report included points on items such as the sale of alcohol within stadia, crush barriers, fences, turnstiles, ticket prices and other stadium items.
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