Vin­ode Mam­chan

A bleak Fri­day was made worse for T&TEC foot­ballers and crick­eters with the news that the Com­mis­sion is no longer go­ing to fund their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the top flight of both crick­et and foot­ball in this coun­try. In re­lease is­sued yes­ter­day af­ter­noon by Cor­po­rate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Man­ag­er, Annabelle Bras­nell, T&TEC stat­ed its en­gage­ment in a cost re­duc­tion ex­er­cise as the rea­son for its with­draw­al of fund­ing from its pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball and crick­et teams. The re­lease went on to state :"The Com­mis­sion is cur­rent­ly en­gaged in a cost re­duc­tion ex­er­cise across the or­gan­i­sa­tion, in an ef­fort to bal­ance its over­all bud­get, which has a pro­ject­ed short­fall in the re­gion of $0.75 bil­lion by the end of the fi­nan­cial year on De­cem­ber 31. "As part of this cost cut­ting ex­er­cise, the Com­mis­sion has re­duced its cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $10m, in­clud­ing salaries and wages."

T&TEC how­ev­er, went on to con­firm that it re­mains com­mit­ted to its play­ers and will con­tin­ue to give them non-fi­nan­cial sup­port as they com­plete the 2011/2012 Pro League sea­son. The com­pa­ny al­so af­firmed that the fi­nan­cial de­ci­sion does not af­fect the tenure of play­ers who are per­ma­nent and tem­po­rary em­ploy­ees with the Com­mis­sion. The com­pa­ny has been spend­ing close to $3m to keep the two teams com­pet­i­tive in their re­spec­tive dis­ci­plines. Pe­ter Mo­han who is man­ag­er of both the T&TEC foot­ball and crick­et teams told the Guardian that they were told this a lit­tle while ago and they are go­ing to fight to stay in the top flight be­cause of all the ef­forts that went in­to build­ing both teams over the past few years. "We have made tremen­dous strides over the past few years and we are com­pet­ing in the top flight of both crick­et and foot­ball. A lot of hard work went in­to this ef­fort and we are not go­ing to sit idly by and al­low the ef­forts to go down the drain. "We are go­ing to con­tin­ue to com­pete in the T&T Pro league and in the crick­et Pre­mier­ship and we are look­ing to the T&TEC Sports Club to as­sist in keep­ing the teams afloat fi­nan­cial­ly. It would be dif­fi­cult but we are hop­ing to work hard to raise funds to keep our teams to­geth­er."

T&TEC has been giv­ing $2m to the foot­ball team and $1m to the crick­et team. Mo­han said it costs in the re­gion of $1.5m to man­age the foot­ball sec­tion and about $400,000 to take care of the crick­et team. "We are look­ing to make up the short fall to keep our team com­pet­i­tive and if this does not work, we will have to re­vert to play­ing just our em­ploy­ees in the crick­et and foot­ball teams. "We have em­ploy­ees in both our crick­et and foot­ball teams, so in a worst case sce­nario we will have to just play with our own play­ers. Of course it would af­fect the qual­i­ty of our team but at least we will still be in­volved in the sports." The T&TEC crick­et team has a num­ber of na­tion­al play­ers in­clud­ing T&T cap­tain De­nesh Ramdin, all rounders Kevon Coop­er, Rayad Em­rit, Richard Kel­ly and bats­man Ja­son Mo­hammed.