Vin­ode Mam­chan

?Crick­et op­er­a­tions man­ag­er at the West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB), Tony Howard said Dwayne and Dar­ren Bra­vo were booked to fly to St Vin­cent on Sun­day but missed their flight.

Howard's com­ments fol­lowed the T&T Guardian's ex­clu­sive re­port yes­ter­day which re­vealed the broth­ers were made to pay for their tick­ets for the lim­it­ed overs match­es against Zim­bab­we–the first of which is be­ing played to­day. The play­ers ar­rived at Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port on Mon­day on­ly to be told that no arrange­ments were made for them to trav­el on that mron­ing's flight. They left one hour lat­er af­ter dip­ping in­to their wal­lets to pur­chase the nec­es­sary tick­ets. How­ev­er, on ar­rival at the Arnos Vale In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port, there was no one to meet them and their frus­tra­tion fur­ther in­creased when they ar­rived at the team's ho­tel on­ly to dis­cov­er no reser­va­tions were made.

Howard said the se­lec­tors want­ed to pick Dwayne at the be­gin­ning of the se­ries but med­ical checks re­vealed his in­jured fin­ger in­jury had not healed. "I tried to con­tact him last week and could not get through. I then got through to him via some­one else and in­formed him to go to Dr Ter­ry Ali for a check up. He did and Dr Ali said he was fit enough to play." Howard said he tried con­tact­ing him lat­er on to let him know his flight was on Sun­day morn­ing at 6.30 am. "How­ev­er, I was not suc­cess­ful so I sent him a text mes­sage, in­di­cat­ing he was on Caribbean Air­lines flight 412.

"It is my un­der­stand­ing that Bra­vo was play­ing crick­et in Trinidad on Sun­day and turned up on Mon­day for the flight and ob­vi­ous­ly he was not booked." The for­mer West In­dies spin­ner said when the play­ers ar­rived in St Vin­cent their in­di­vid­ual names would not have been on the records at the ho­tel. "We book an en­tire group and they would have been in­clud­ed on the West In­dies team group."