A source close to the So­ca War­riors On­line (SWO) has con­firmed that a FI­FA con­fer­ence for the po­si­tions of Con­ca­caf gen­er­al sec­re­tary and Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tors be­gan on Tues­day in Guadala­jara, Mex­i­co. Rep­re­sent­ing the T&T Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tion (T&TFF) were its cur­rent gen­er­al sec­re­tary Richard Gro­den, and Guyana Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor and coach Ja­maal Shabaaz. The source fur­ther dis­closed that he had a prob­lem in par­tic­u­lar with Ja­maal Shabaaz be­ing coach of Guyana and rep­re­sent­ing the T&TFF at the same time.

He said that: "One per­son should not work for and rep­re­sent two na­tion­al as­so­ci­a­tions si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly. It is un­heard of and un­ac­cept­able. Noth­ing per­son­al, but, there is a con­flict of in­ter­est here. "This is the non­sense that the T&TFF clique is al­ways pro­mot­ing. "The T&TFF is al­so guilty of not hav­ing a Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor at the con­fer­ence be­cause they have not filled the va­can­cy cre­at­ed by the non-re­new­al of for­mer Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor Lin­coln Phillips' con­tract by Sport Com­pa­ny of T&T and Min­istry of Sport. "The fact is though, that all mem­bers of FI­FA are re­quired to have a Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor on their staff and paid for from FI­FA fund­ing.

"Shabazz is here as head of T&TFF coach­ing ed­u­ca­tion pro­gramme-a dou­ble sham I say," said the source.

On­ly last week T&TFF gen­er­al sec­re­tary Richard Gro­den es­caped pun­ish­ment from FI­FA over the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU), Qatari Mo­hamed Bin Ham­mam and for­mer FI­FA vice-pres­i­dent Jack Warn­er bribery scan­dal. Gro­den was one of the more for­tu­nate CFU of­fi­cials, as he and four oth­er of­fi­cials re­ceived just a warn­ing from the FI­FA ethics com­mit­tee.