Sport Ministry fails football again
... Late payment KOs T&T U-15 footballers while local coaches still unpaid
By LASANA LIBURD (Wired868)Twenty-one year old Trinidad and Tobago track star Jehue Gordon lifted the mood of sport enthusiasts today with a golden run in the 2013 IAAF World Championships in Moscow, Russia.
The Trinidad and Tobago national under-15 football players might not have felt like celebrating, though, as the young “Soca Warriors” suffered the ignominy of being withdrawn from a CONCACAF tournament, due to issues arising from a late confirmation of funding from the Ministry of Sport.
The CONCACAF under-15 tournament kicked off on Tuesday evening in the Cayman Islands and Trinidad and Tobago was scheduled to take the field earlier today against Honduras while the boys should have travelled to the competition’s venue since Sunday August 11.
Trinidad and Tobago Football Association (TTFA) general secretary Sheldon Phillips told Wired868 that the local football submitted a budget of roughly $380,000 to the Sport Ministry in the third week of July.
CONCACAF takes care of accommodation, meals and ground transport for all participants. But the TTFA needed the Sport Ministry to pay for its airfare and stipends for the team’s coaches.
The football body was willing to send its squad without payment and then try to collect stipends for its staff after the competition. All that was required was a phone call from the Ministry of Sport to Naipaul’s Travel that would authorise the travel agency to book the team’s flight to the Cayman Islands.
But the Sport Ministry’s “okay” happened just three days ago; well after the national team’s deadline.
Wired868 contacted an official at the Sport Ministry for comment but was told that only Permanent Secretary Ashwin Creed could explain what happened. The website failed to reach Creed up to the time of publication.
“Personally, I’m gutted at the fact that we had to pull the team,” said Phillips. “It is still ultimately the TTFA’s duty to manage the team and that is the most frustrating thing because we have had to rely almost entirely on the Government… In the last few days, I was fuelled by thoughts of how I would have felt as a 14-year-old player.”
Today, Phillips wrote the parents of the players as well as CONCACAF general secretary Enrique Sanz to inform them of the country’s withdrawal from the competition. Trinidad and Tobago is not known to have ever withdrawn a team from a CONCACAF football competition and the late pull-out means the two island republic could be handed an international ban, although the TTFA is not worried about that prospect at the moment.
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