I held tickets for Sunday's 'Football Extravaganza' at the Hong Kong Stadium. We wanted to go to the second match only, which was to have started at 4pm.
Living in the New Territories, we planned to leave at around 2pm. At around 11.30am, because of the bad weather, we started to try to find out whether the matches were cancelled. Several phone calls to the Hong Kong Stadium, the Hong Kong Football Association and Ken Catton Enterprises, the organiser of the event, led to nothing as all had a pre-recorded message asking to call during office hours. I eventually called RTHK to ask if it had received any information.
I was told it had not and as far as it knew the matches would go ahead, but as soon as it heard otherwise it would announce it on the radio. We kept listening, but nothing was announced. We kept ringing the stadium, the Football Association and the organiser, to no avail. It looked like we would have to travel through the rain for an hour and a half just to get an answer.
As we were about to leave we thought of calling the sports bar in the stadium. The barman there told us the matches had been cancelled.
Nothing had been announced on English-language radio and there was no hotline or phone number we could ring to find out about the can cellations.
I have subsequently been told the Football Association has a hotline where it announces cancellations like these, but this is only in Cantonese. I think it is ridiculous, for non-Chinese speakers (and there were a lot of them amongst the Ajax fans who held tickets for the second match!), that it was nearly impossible to find out about the cancellation of the match.
