A more-than-scary sta­tis­tic, which shows that more than 30,000 young peo­ple have lost their jobs due to the gov­ern­ment's re­fusal to al­low sport, as an in­dus­try to be played, has led to a group of con­cerned foot­ballers to take to the streets of Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day in a and show the dis­ap­point­ment via a silent protest, call­ing for foot­ball, in par­tic­u­lar, to be played.

The group of foot­ball play­ers, coach­es and oth­er of­fi­cials wore red T-shirts with the words - 'Let foot­ball play in safe zones,' print­ed on them fol­low­ing the gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to shut down sports be­cause of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic al­most two years ago.

Their walk, which be­gan at the bot­tom of Hen­ry Street, near the South Quay, and pro­ceed­ed through the cap­i­tal city, via In­de­pen­dence Square, up Fred­er­ick Street to Wood­ford Square, then down Abre­crom­by street to­wards the of­fice of the Sports Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe, whose Min­istry of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment of­fice is housed at Nicholas Tow­er on In­de­pen­dence Square, with an aimed at send­ing a mes­sage to her about the ap­par­ent un­fair treat­ment be­ing dished out to sports in gen­er­al, and foot­ball in par­tic­u­lar, as all oth­er in­dus­tries are al­lowed to 'vac­ci­nate and op­er­ate' ac­cord­ing to a call by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley a few months ago to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty.

Michael De Four, Di­rec­tor of Foot­ball at cen­tral club Cunu­pia FC who was one of the or­gan­is­ers of the peace­ful walk, said his team alone has lost three play­ers due to the shut-down. He told Guardian Me­dia Sports on Thurs­day: "Foot­ball in T&T should be an in­dus­try. I did some stats and there are about 30,000 peo­ple in T&T that play foot­ball at some sort of com­pet­i­tive lev­el, sep­a­rat­ed by an­oth­er 25,000, who use foot­ball as a recre­ation­al ac­tiv­i­ty. The in­dus­try gen­er­ates an es­ti­mat­ed TT$800,000 in eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty an­nu­al­ly and that has been shut down. So you're talk­ing about some 20,000 to 30,000 young peo­ple who are out of some form of in­come. We're say­ing that af­ter an en­ti­ty de­cid­ed to fol­low Gov­ern­ment's pro­pos­al to vac­ci­nate to op­er­ate, we were de­nied and that was the cat­a­lyst that pro­voked us to come to this peace­ful walk to do like the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and make a state­ment with­out say­ing a word. We've lost three play­ers, one to crime, he was not go­ing to come back. We lost one to drugs, not the le­gal drugs but the il­le­gal drugs, and we've lost an­oth­er one who just doesn't want to play foot­ball again, and these are tru­ly tal­ent­ed in­di­vid­u­als. And that is just one team. We have over 120 com­pet­i­tive teams in Trinidad and To­ba­go," De Four ex­plained.

When the march reached Aber­crom­by street, head­ing south­wards, po­lice of­fi­cers, both on foot pa­trol and in ve­hi­cles made their pres­ence felt, by stop­ping some of the par­tic­i­pants and field­ing ques­tions to the group about the event. How­ev­er, the march was al­lowed to con­tin­ue af­ter De Four, the Cunu­pia foot­ball boss ease the con­cerns of the of­fi­cers by en­sur­ing them that the re­quired num­bers of 10 per­sons per groups were main­tained dur­ing the march.

The Min­istries of Health and Sports were sin­gled out by the the foot­ball stake­hold­ers, as well as Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley as the on­ly ones with the pow­er to af­fect change from the march, but fol­low­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion of the bud­get in Oc­to­ber in which no ad­di­tion­al fund­ing was giv­en to sports, De Four said he was nei­ther con­fi­dent that sports will re­turn, dis­ap­point­ed that the min­istry of sports could not put for­ward a case for sports to be re­turned to play, nor even cer­tain that a case was made at all by the min­istry for on-the-field sports to be re­turned.

Mean­while, Ran­dolph Boyce, the Cen­tral Soc­cer World coach echoed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments, say­ing there was not even an at­tempt to al­low sports to be re­turned.

Ac­cord­ing to Boyce, they're not fight­ing against the health is­sues, but they want to know or ask if they can be giv­en some­thing in prin­ci­ple. "Give us some­thing that we could work with on when sports would start back to play. There is the Pro League, there is the Su­per League, there are zones, there are foot­ball acad­e­mies, so you can start at the high­est lev­el, where it will be tri­als and er­rors. And if you have to shut it down then we could un­der­stand that, but you're not start­ing it at all, so to us, there are no plans at all."