Vin­ode Mam­chan

The long await­ed Bri­an Lara Sta­di­um is ex­pect­ed to wel-come crick­et in the new year and plans are afoot to host the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the 2017 Caribbean Pre­mier League (CPL) at the venue in Tarou­ba, South Trinidad.

Com­ple­tion work on the con­tro­ver­sial venue was restart­ed un­der the present gov­ern­ment af­ter the build­ing was left idle for sev­er­al years need­ing com­ple­tion be­fore it could be oc­cu­pied.

Work has been on­go­ing for al­most a year now and sources close to the gov­ern­ment told the Sun­day Guardian that the gov­ern­ment of the day plan to bid for the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny to take place at the venue which should co­in­cide with the of?fi­cial open­ing of the ground, which is Ju­ly, 2017.

Ac­cord­ing to the source: "The sta­di­um is owned by the gov­ern­ment and of course the own­ers of the CPL will be look­ing to use it be­cause it would be cheap­er than the Oval. The venue is world class for what it of­fers in terms of 'live' broad­cast and this will be a great fit for the CPL which is called the great­est par­ty in sport when it comes to the game's T20 for­mat."

CPL rents the Queen's Park Oval for an av­er­age of US$40,000 per day (an es­ti­mat­ed TT$300,000) and now the gov­ern­ment can use the fa­cil­i­ty to ne­go­ti­ate with the or­gan­is­ers to have more match­es played in T&T.

Chair­man of the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UDe­COTT) Noel Gar­cia re­vealed a cou­ple months ago that15 pack­ages out of 17 were award­ed to con­trac­tors and work is on­go­ing at the site in Tarou­ba.

Clean up work at the site has been com­plet­ed, struc­tur­al work is on­go­ing and near­ing com­ple­tion.

Gen­er­al re­pair and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion works on the build­ing are go­ing to­geth­er with work on the field (the grass has been re­plant­ed), work on the pavil­ion is al­most over and of­fi­cials are look­ing at clos­ing out work on the fa­cil­i­ty for the lat­est Jan­u­ary, 2017.

The ini­tial cost giv­en in 2006 for the sta­di­um was $500 mil­lion TT dol­lars, when con­struc­tion start­ed to have it ready for the T&T leg of the 2007 ICC Lim­it­ed Overs World Cup for which T&T se­cured the Brown pack­age.

How­ev­er, with the cost over­runs and the in­crease in prices of ma­te­ri­als, this amount has in­creased sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

The Chair­man of UDE­COTT, as of June 2008, Calder Hart, had placed the ap­prox­i­mate com­ple­tion date at Ju­ly 2008, some two years af­ter the ini­tial sched­ule han­dover. Now it should be ready nine years on.

This sta­di­um will serve as a train­ing fa­cil­i­ty for crick­et play­ers.

It will fea­ture four in­door crick­et train­ing pitch­es with com­put­erised bio­met­ric tech­nol­o­gy to mea­sure an ath­lete's per­for­mance, in­clud­ing two full-length run-up pitch­es for fast-bowlers.

Pa­trons at the sta­di­um will have an un­hin­dered view from every area of the fa­cil­i­ty, in­clud­ing the con­ces­sion­aires area.

It al­so has ar­eas specif­i­cal­ly de-signed for the print, ra­dio and tele­vi­sion me­dia, re­spec­tive­ly.