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Is the Sevens ticketing system fair to everybody?

On Saturday morning I, along with thousands of other fans, proceeded to join the queue for Rugby Sevens tickets.

That was just the beginning of the problems.

During the entire waiting period there were no toilets available for what must have been more than 3,000 hopeful fans. Welcome to Hong Kong, Asia's 'third-world' city.

During the inordinately long time it took to approach the stadium, no information was given except towards the end when a largely inaudible announcement was made that the queue had reached 2,500.

Despite repeated requests, no information was available from security staff as to which point in the queue this applied to. Surely it would be simple enough to issue numbers to each arriving fan passing a temporary turnstile so that everybody, staff included, knew where they stood.

Last year it was a comparatively straightforward operation but this year standards seem to have fallen drastically. Dare I hope that next year we shall see a rather more efficient operation or will we see standards slip to the point at which crowd trouble breaks out?

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