Vin­ode Mam­chan

T&T Red Force will be­gin ho­n­ours for the 2016/17 West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) Pro­fes­sion­al Crick­et League (PCL) at home against the Wind­wards Vol­cano on Fri­day, No­vem­ber 11.

In fact the T&T fran­chise will play their first three match­es at home as they bid for ho­n­ours that have elud­ed them in the longer for­mat of the game.

With­in the next week or so the play­ers to rep­re­sent this coun­try in the se­ries of match­es will be named and they will un­der­go prepa­ra­tions for fi­nal se­lec­tion. The play­ers re­tained by the T&T Red Force have been work­ing through­out the year as their con­tracts re­quire and they have been do­ing a lot of work at the Na­tion­al Crick­et Cen­tre (NCC) in Cou­va. Train­ing is ex­pect­ed to in­ten­si­fy over the next few weeks un­der Head Coach Gus Lo­gie.

Again the sea­son has been split in­to two with the first round of five match­es be­ing played up to De­cem­ber 22 and the league re­sum­ing on March 7, to make way for the Nagi­co Su­per50 tour­na­ment, which will be played ear­ly in the year.

Af­ter their ini­tial meet­ing against the Wind­wards, the T&T Red Force will then op­pose Bar­ba­dos Pride from No­vem­ber 18 right here in Trinidad. They then play hosts to Lee­ward Is­lands Hur­ri­canes the fol­low­ing week­end.

There first over­seas game will be­gin on De­cem­ber 9, when they trav­el to Ja­maica and they round off their pre-Christ­mas cam­paign against Guyana at the Prov­i­dence Sta­di­um from De­cem­ber 9.

Cur­rent­ly work on the NCC out­field is on­go­ing and this means that the first few PCL match­es is like­ly to go to the Queen's Park Oval. The T&T Red Force fran­chise is how­ev­er look­ing at their spend­ing and they will be hop­ing to get the NCC ready as quick­ly as pos­si­ble, so that they can re­duce ground rent­ing costs.

The West In­dies Crick­et Board (WICB) had ini­tial­ly giv­en all the fran­chis­es a three-year term to be­come self suf­fi­cient but this has not worked out.

The board has de­cid­ed to go the ex­tra mile and take up the cost of op­er­at­ing the fran­chis­es un­til 2021 at which time, they would all have to fund their own teams.

The WICB has tak­en the view that the re­gion is cur­rent­ly un­der­go­ing fi­nan­cial con­straints and as such has giv­en the fran­chis­es fur­ther time to get their hous­es in or­der fi­nan­cial­ly. The WICB had cut salaries of the se­nior play­ers a cou­ple sea­sons ago in or­der to fund the PCL, which they see as crit­i­cal in get­ting the re­gion­al team back to the top.