STADIUM STORIES: Only Q is: Are you ready to join and have a blast with this Kerala pack?

IN KERALA, WHEN YOU PACK SOMETHING, you pack it good. Case in point: kozhukatta. Entire families spend the day grating coconuts and making preparations because they have to pack some rice dough. Then you have the KSRTC buses. They get packed so tight, it blows FedEx packaging out of the water. The "beverage shops", too, always packed with men queueing up to pack their (already avial-packed) stomachs full of liquor. Even animals aren't spared, and the poor elephants have the worst of it.

But if people in Kerala love something more than elephants, it's football. Kerala is packed with football fans. All year long, local football scene is dominated by the state league and action-packed 7-a-side tournaments, but when October comes around, all the madness around the beautiful game packs up into a fist and lands onto one particular stadium.

And it gets packed to the brink. 

Meet Kochi's grandest, most illustrious sporting arena, which hosts both cricket and football.

Oh, and this, too, is named after Jawaharlal Nehru.

But other than the name, this gigantic venue with a capacity of 60,900 proudly stands out from the rest of the stadiums in ISL in multiple ways. For one, it allowed Kerala Blasters to ramp up an average home crowd attendance of 49,111; the highest in the tournament. It also has a uniquely designed HD-friendly floodlight layout, facilities for match operations so advanced that hosting U-17 World Cup matches will require little upgrading, and a whole stand named after Sachin Tendulkar. 

And it can pack people like anything. So much so that when it hosted the Nehru Cup (Nehru Cup in Nehru stadium, oh mine) in 1997, the match between India and Iraq saw more than a hundred thousand people cram into the stadium, nearly double-packing the ground. 

Perhaps fittingly, one-day international cricket matches held here have often been packed full of runs. India have won high-scoring matches here against teams like Australia, South Africa and Pakistan, and have in turn been sent packing by Australia, West Indies and Zimbabwe. 

And it's quite a fun place to be, from what we hear. Here, on a night of football you can bump into these guys...

Or these guys and girls...

Basically, during an ISL game, every corner gets packed full of fans enjoying the hell out of the match. 

That said, one has to be careful about buying tickets to the right blocks to get a better view of the match, especially since this is a stadium with a round pitch to accomodate cricket. It's better to end up along the long ends of the football pitch, and these are the blocks that will see to it you are there:

Lower Tier: Block 2,3,4, 6, 7 and 8.
Middle and Upper Tier: Block 11 and 13. 

Lower tier might have some hospitality. Middle tier has the best view. Upper tier is a gallery and has no chairs. But it's good company. The middle and upper tiers are the actual party places in this ground. TFG verdict: go for the middle tier. 

When it comes to ticket prices, Kerala Blasters have been one of the best in ISL. Most matchdays their tickets were priced between Rs 100-500 in the first season. The stadium has ten corporate boxes so they were sold for one lakh rupees each to companies. But the ordinary fans did not get ripped off. This goes on to show that among all the ISL franchises, Kerala Blasters perhaps take their fans most seriously, as a community to cultivate long term rather than use them as immediate profit fodder. 

So that's about it. Right now Kochi's Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium is waiting to get packed full of fans again, who will pack their drums and flags and turn up in thousands to support their home team during some action-packed football matches. 

The question is, will you be joining the pack? 

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