The blanking of Lasana Liburd
By Keith Smith (Trinidad Express)
In truth, I would have had to be out of my mind to have expected the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (T&TFF), that is to say Jack Warner, to accredit Lasana Liburd to the World Cup Finals. Mr Warner said as much. He was talking backwards at the time but you could glean, if you had the slightest bit of sense, what would be the "forwards":
"Apart from the fact that he has been consistently refused accreditation to the World Cup qualifying games in T&T, who is he?" Mr Warner rhetorically asked in the speech opportunity he mounted on January 3 at the Crowne Plaza before continuing:
"Apart from the fact that he is working against his employers, the CCN Group acquiring the broadcast rights for the World Cup in 2010 who is he? In 1995 I obtained the local TV rights for (the World Cup) for the princely sum of US$1 and sold it to TV6 for US$250,000 which sum went towards the development of football in the T&TFF. The same was done in 1998, 2002 and 2006 with increases in each case. Liburd continues to make this an issue and I can give him only one assurance today and that is I will review the sales of these rights to his employers for the 2010 (World Cup Finals). So again I ask the question: Who is Liburd, what is his claim to fame?"
I don't want to waste the limited space I have here by dwelling on Mr Warner's last Liburd-related question except to say that, as we speak Liburd, through his investigation of the top FIFA official that is Jack, is one of the most famous, if not the most famous, in the sense of being talked about, football correspondents in the world today.
What I want to do, though, is to share with you the sharp craftiness of Jack's strategy. Here he is charging that Liburd "has been consistently refused accreditation to the World Cup qualifying matches in T&T", as if this was Liburd's fault and Mr Warner was not, in fact, the refuser, Lasana having this pesky penchant for not taking Jack at his word, other reporters buying wholesale the line about the money earned from the sales of local TV rights but Liburd demanding:
"Show me the money!" That is to say, let us see the break down on paper, what went where, chart this "development of local football" so that citizens can count, once and for all, how much money we owe Jack and, by the same token how much money Jack owes us, one of the central issues about Jack's continuing kingship over local football being a total absence of transparency, the secrecy of Mr Warner's Simpaul ownership a symptom of a system that leaves room for at least the suspicion of corruption.
So, as I said, in the context of all this I knew that there was a far greater chance of Minshall bringing a Carnival band this year than Liburd getting the World Cup nod from the T&TFF, the local football authority insisting in its very first correspondence on the issue that its decision was final. The question, then, you might want to ask is why, given this knowledge, did I submit his name? And the answer is simple? At 60 years old I have come to know that, in life, nothing should be taken for granted and, whatever my preconceived notions, I wasn't about to prejudge the fairness of or, to put it more bluntly, the extent of T&TFF victimisation.
Always at the back of my professional mind was the thought that my primary responsibility in this regard was to have a CCN presence in place to cover Trinidad and Tobago's historic adventure in FIFA's World Cup Finals on Germany. As a group we submitted four names to cover all our bases - including dropouts for reasons of illness, non-accreditation of this reporter and/or that reporter - or whatever - during the next few months and I was not about to pre-disaccredit Mr Liburd on the basis of my own expectations.
Not when not only, far from doing anything wrong, he had brought honour to the paper by refusing, over all these years, to wilt under the seductive power and, lately, the national popularity of the Jack, the nimble, Jack, the quick and Jack, the FIFA formidable.
(Continued on Monday)
