Vin­ode Mam­chan

As we con­tin­ue this spe­cial se­ries on the struc­ture of club crick­et and what is the best so­lu­tion for de­vel­op­ment, pres­i­dent of the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB), Az­im Bas­sarath says he would like to see crick­et played on Fri­days in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Cur­rent­ly the top flight of lo­cal crick­et is played on­ly on week­ends with the match start­ing on a Sat­ur­day, be­fore a break for lim­it­ed overs crick­et on the Sun­day and then fin­ish­ing on the fol­low­ing week­end, Sat­ur­day and Sun­day.

Bas­sarath thinks that the way for­ward in terms of pro­fes­sion­al­is­ing crick­et is to get the play­ers to fin­ish a match on three con­sec­u­tive days.

He said: "The Min­is­ter of Sport the Ho­n­ourable Brent San­cho has told us at the Crick­et Board to start look­ing in­to a se­mi-pro­fes­sion­al set for top flight crick­et in T&T.

"What this tells me, is that we need to get a struc­ture where­by we start crick­et on Fri­day af­ter­noon and then we move in­to the Sat­ur­day and Sun­day and fin­ish the match in three con­sec­u­tive days.

"There are ben­e­fits to this and one be­ing, the play­ers hav­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence of play­ing crick­et on a third day pitch. Un­der the cur­rent sys­tem we have play­ers play­ing at best on a sec­ond day pitch. This is some­thing that we in­tend to look in­to as we move T&T's crick­et un­to the pro­fes­sion­al part."

Calls have been made for this struc­ture in the past but it has been met with re­sis­tance in some quar­ters with the ar­gu­ment be­ing, play­ers would not get time off from their place of em­ploy­ment to play crick­et on a Fri­day.

Bas­sarath re­spond­ed by say­ing: "I am talk­ing about tak­ing the crick­et se­mi-pro or to­tal­ly pro­fes­sion­al here. If this is the case, then the play­ers would be paid well to play and they can then work out some sort of an arrange­ment with their em­ploy­ers.

"One of the ide­al sit­u­a­tions is to get one of the cor­po­rate com­pa­nies lo­cal­ly to adopt a club. If they do this and then have own­er­ship of the club, they can then in­te­grate the play­ers skills in­to their or­gan­i­sa­tion­al set up to en­hance his val­ue to the com­pa­ny and al­so al­low him the time to play his crick­et.

"An­oth­er op­tion for clubs is to en­ter in­to arrange­ments with com­pa­nies to al­low their play­ers to come out half day on a Fri­day to play crick­et and then the play­er makes up for the time loss dur­ing the week. If there is a will to get this done, I see no rea­son why it can­not be achieved."

Bas­sarath al­so liked the point of hav­ing the Sun­day Leagues played in a 'block.'

"If the league is played on three con­sec­u­tive days, then we will have no choice but to have the Sun­day League played as a 'block of games' in­stead hav­ing it sep­a­rat­ed as we have now.

There is al­so good val­ue to do­ing this be­cause we can brand the tour­na­ment bet­ter and get more spon­sors in­volved in the league and the ben­e­fits will trick­le down to the clubs to as­sist with their de­vel­op­ment."

Bas­sarath end­ed by say­ing that the lo­cal crick­et struc­ture is flu­id and his board will con­tin­ue to look at ways of get­ting the best out of the set up in terms of bring­ing bet­ter­ment to the sport and the play­ers.