The de­ci­sion by Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er to re­sign as a vice pres­i­dent of FI­FA, as the pres­i­dent of CON­CA­CAF and as the pres­i­dent of the Caribbean Foot­ball Union would not have come as a sur­prise to any­one who has been fol­low­ing his an­nounce­ments since his pro­vi­sion­al sus­pen­sion by the world foot­ball body. Warn­er had sig­naled the pos­si­bil­i­ty that he would re­sign from his in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball com­mit­ments by state­ments he made at a be­lat­ed In­di­an Ar­rival Day func­tion in his con­stituen­cy when he said that if he had to choose be­tween serv­ing FI­FA and serv­ing the peo­ple of T&T, he would choose the lat­ter. Dis­cern­ing minds would have read that state­ment, at the time, as prepar­ing those

who val­ue his work eth­ic and the promise of his per­for­mance as the min­is­ter of works for his even­tu­al res­ig­na­tion. But oth­er state­ments made by Mr Warn­er ap­pear to con­tra­dict the one made at the

In­di­an Ar­rival Day cel­e­bra­tion.

For ex­am­ple, when the news broke of his al­leged in­volve­ment in a cash-for-votes scan­dal in­volv­ing mem­bers of the Caribbean Foot­ball Union and the sus­pend­ed FI­FA vice pres­i­dent, Mo­hammed bin Ham­mam, Mr Warn­er was quot­ed as promis­ing a tsuna­mi‚ of rev­e­la­tions in­to the in­ner work­ings of the world foot­ball body. And in the week that fol­lowed‚ the same week in which the vot­ing for the FI­FA

pres­i­dent took place‚ Mr Warn­er ap­peared to be ful­fill­ing his tsuna­mi promise when he re­leased an e-mail in which the FI­FA gen­er­al sec­re­tary ap­peared to sug­gest that Qatar had bought the 2022 World Cup. It is safe to sug­gest that Mr Warn­er's de­ci­sion to re­lease con­fi­den­tial e-mails be­tween him­self and top-rank­ing FI­FA mem­bers would not have gone down well with that em­bat­tled group of foot­ball ad­min­is­tra­tors. It is al­so pos­si­ble that Mr Warn­er was told, in no un­cer­tain terms, that that par­tic­u­lar knife had the po­ten­tial to cut both ways and that re­leas­ing con­fi­den­tial e-mails in­volv­ing a body that prides it­self on con­fi­den­tial­i­ty would not have gone down well at FI­FA.

The boss­es of foot­ball may have hanged Mr Warn­er's jack. It al­so needs to be said that Warn­er should have re­signed from his foot­ball com­mit­ments more than a year ago when he was first ap­point­ed as a mem­ber of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar's Cab­i­net. Warn­er ought to have known that his at­tempt to serve mas­ters in Zurich and those in Port-of-Spain at the same time was ill-ad­vised and im­pru­dent‚ de­spite the le­gal ad­vice that At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan pro­cured from se­nior at­tor­neys at the time, which in­di­cat­ed that there was no con­flict of in­ter­est. The fact that he chose not to heed the ad­vice from many quar­ters‚ in­clud­ing it must be said, from the ed­i­to­ri­als of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Guardian‚ to re­sign when he was ap­point­ed to the Cab­i­net makes his res­ig­na­tion more than a year lat­er seem like the ac­tion of a man whose back was against the wall. De­spite all, it is ap­pro­pri­ate to rec­og­nize, as FI­FA has done, the ster­ling ser­vice of Mr

Warn­er to the de­vel­op­ment of foot­ball in the re­gion. While an hon­est as­sess­ment of that con­tri­bu­tion is yet to be done, there is lit­tle doubt that he raised the pro­file of the re­gion's foot­ball dur­ing his stew­ar­ship over CON­CA­CAF (the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, North Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean). Mr Warn­er's res­ig­na­tion from his in­ter­na­tion­al foot­ball com­mit­ments al­so means that 100 per cent of his en­er­gy and his un­doubt­ed or­gan­i­sa­tion­al prowess can now be ded­i­cat­ed to the de­vel­op­ment of T&T. This turn of events may turn out to be in every­one in T&T in­ter­est. And for the world of foot­ball, all that re­mains to be said is that there is un­like­ly to be an­oth­er Jack Warn­er‚ com­ing from a very small coun­try and wield­ing the kind of pow­er that he did‚ ever again in the game.