Vin­ode Mam­chan

Eng­land and Aus­tralia vis­its to the Caribbean this year will see them play five Test match­es, in two se­ries but fans in T&T would not be able to see any of them at the Queen's Park Oval, due to a tech­ni­cal­i­ty and poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Back in the day, when ma­jor Test play­ing na­tions came to the Caribbean, Port-of-Spain was al­ways a venue on the fix­ture, now, with so many world class fa­cil­i­ties built around the re­gion, as a lega­cy to the ICC 2007 World Cup, a bid process is now in place.

The West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) has asked that the bids come from re­spec­tive gov­ern­ments in the re­gion and not from their ter­ri­to­r­i­al crick­et boards. As a re­sult they did not en­ter­tain com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB) and as a re­sult there would be no Test match at the Queen's Park Oval.

CEO of the T&T Crick­et Board (TTCB), Su­ruj Ra­goonath ex­plained that the board had got­ten a pledge from the gov­ern­ment through the then min­is­ter of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty Gary Grif­fith, that they were will­ing to in­vest US$250,000 to stage the sec­ond match in the Aus­tralian se­ries at the Queen's Park Oval.

Speak­ing to the T&T Guardian Ra­goonath said: "The WICB sent a doc­u­ment to the TTCB to get the T&T Gov­ern­ment to bid to host the sec­ond Test be­tween West In­dies and Aus­tralia. The bid, which was guar­an­teed by the gov­ern­ment, was sent to the WICB via the TTCB. The WICB lat­er in­di­cat­ed that Ja­maica would in­stead be the host as the bid was not sent di­rect­ly by the T&T Gov­ern­ment. By the time we got this in­for­ma­tion from the WICB it was too late to do any­thing fur­ther as Ja­maica was al­ready an­nounced as the host."

Ja­maica will host the sec­ond match, while the first game of the se­ries will take place in Do­mini­ca. The Eng­land se­ries, which pre­ceeds the Aus­tralian bat­tle, will take place in An­tigua, Grena­da and Bar­ba­dos.

Pres­i­dent of the TTCB, Az­im Bas­sarath said that no bids went in for the Eng­land se­ries. "The gov­ern­ment did not send in any bids for the Eng­land se­ries, so we de­cid­ed to en­gage them to get a match for the Aus­tralian se­ries, which was the big­ger se­ries.

"They got in­volved but in the end the time fac­tor was not in our favour to get the Gov­ern­ment to re-send their bid. I, how­ev­er, want to thank them for their in­ter­est and hope to work close­ly with new Min­is­ter of Sport, Brent San­cho, in or­der to se­cure fu­ture match­es in a time­ly man­ner."