Shari John

The 'Move­ment for Change', the group in op­po­si­tion to the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion of the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB), held yet an­oth­er heat­ed news con­fer­ence at the Nor­mandie Ho­tel yes­ter­day to re­it­er­ate the short­com­ings of the present ex­ec­u­tive. The mem­bers, for­mer Min­is­ter of Sport, Manohar Ram­saran, West In­dies leg­end, Bernard Julien, vice-pres­i­dent of the T&TCB, Az­im Bas­sarath, Dr Allen Sam­my, Bal­dath Ma­habir and Ma­hadeo Bo­doe ac­cused the Deryck Mur­ray ad­min­is­tra­tion of fis­cal ir­re­spon­si­bil­i­ty dur­ing 2008. The body pro­duced a hard copy of the fi­nan­cial doc­u­ments of the T&TCB re­cent­ly re­leased by the board and point­ed out dif­fer­ences in ex­pen­di­ture and in­come.

Ma­habir re­spond­ed to the is­sue of the $669,611.00 for which Ram­saran had been ac­cused of of­fer­ing no ac­count. They sought to iden­ti­fy al­leged ir­reg­u­lar­i­ties in ex­pen­di­ture over the past four years. In par­tic­u­lar, it was men­tioned again that over one mil­lion dol­lars was spent on food, dur­ing 2008. He con­firmed how­ev­er, that a foren­sic au­dit would be car­ried out on the board's fi­nan­cial doc­u­ments go­ing back at least six years. Ram­saran and Bas­sarath al­so point­ed out that dur­ing Mur­ray's four year stint as Pres­i­dent of the TTCB, the ju­nior na­tion­al teams have not won a ma­jor tour­na­ment, while the Na­tion­al Crick­et Cen­tre (NCC) is in a de­plorable con­di­tion with over $37 mil­lion be­ing spent in de­vel­op­ment over the past four years.

"Crick­et is de­vel­op­men­tal and noth­ing has been won by our na­tion­al ju­nior teams over the past four years. Our youth teams are fail­ing with reg­u­lar­i­ty. How worth­while are our de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes. Where did our $37 mil­lion go?" asked Bas­sarath. Pic­tures of the ar­guably shab­by NCC build­ing with a col­lapsed wall that was on­ly re­cent­ly built, a 'sor­ry' ex­cuse for a gym and the un­tend­ed out­door nets among oth­er is­sues at the cen­tre were pro­duced. Bas­sarath took the time to praise Daren Gan­ga for seek­ing and get­ting spon­sor­ship for the na­tion­al team while bash­ing the TTCB for its in­abil­i­ty to ac­quire spon­sor­ship on its own.

"The spon­sor­ship was sought and ne­go­ti­at­ed by Daren Gan­ga; so please un­der­stand what is hap­pen­ing with Trinidad crick­et. It is like a chick­en with­out a head. There is no amount of PR and no lead­er­ship." The TTCB vice-pres­i­dent even com­ment­ed on the board's CEO, Forbes Per­saud run­ning out on­to the field fol­low­ing T&T's vic­to­ries in the Cham­pi­on's League Twen­ty/20. "In no oth­er part of the world will you see the CEO of a crick­et board run­ning out on a field 'look­ing for the cam­era'," he added.

Mur­ray's re­sponse:

As it re­lat­ed to the mon­ey spent on food, Mur­ray said: "It is very easy to spend over one mil­lion on food for team prepa­ra­tions for U-13, U-17, U-19, the acad­e­my play­ers and the se­nior team. I don't see that as be­ing ir­re­spon­si­ble," he said as he promised to pro­vide a break­down at a lat­er date. He al­so not­ed that "It is in­ter­est­ing that Bas­sarath is ask­ing about our ex­pen­di­ture when he is a part of the ad­min­is­tra­tion." In re­sponse to the pro­posed foren­sic au­dit, the for­mer WI wick­et­keep­er said that he would glad­ly wel­come it, as long as it went back be­fore 2005.

He then point­ed out that the in­crease in ex­pen­di­ture by his ad­min­is­tra­tion was due to it re­ceiv­ing more mon­ey from the gov­ern­ment. "We got monies that they (the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion) didn't get, I don't know why, which we have used in a pru­dent man­ner, for the de­vel­op­ment of crick­et." The ac­cu­sa­tion that his board's de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes were in­ef­fec­tive was al­so blast­ed. "They may not win, but they do ex­treme­ly well and we see their de­vel­op­ment."

"This is the most suc­cess­ful pe­ri­od of crick­et in T&T. No one in the world goes around talk­ing about their youth teams and this just shows the com­plete lack of un­der­stand­ing of de­vel­op­ment." Fi­nal­ly, Mur­ray touched on the fact that the T&TCB did seek spon­sor­ship lo­cal­ly, but it was met with luke­warm re­spons­es. "Spon­sor­ship is a com­mer­cial op­por­tu­ni­ty more than any­thing, and we look for spon­sors both lo­cal­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly." He al­so al­lud­ed to the fact that it was in fact the board, which ap­proached Venky's, the cur­rent spon­sor of the se­nior team tak­ing part in the Cham­pi­on's League Twen­ty/20 in In­dia.