No stipends will be af­ford­ed to lo­cal play­ers cur­rent­ly in train­ing with the na­tion­al team un­der coach Ter­ry Fen­wick and man­ag­er Adri­an Ro­main.

Pro­vi­sions were not made for this in the bud­get sub­mit­ted to foot­ball’s world gov­ern­ing body-FI­FA by the Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, be­ing chaired by busi­ness­man Robert Hadad.

This was one of many is­sues raised by Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith some time ago, as he blamed the FI­FA-ap­point­ed nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee for the state of af­fairs of the team cur­rent­ly.

Grif­fith had said that lo­cal play­ers were not even be­ing giv­en a stipend.

How­ev­er, Hadad in an in­ter­view some time ago, sought to clear the air on this by ex­plain­ing if he pro­vides fund­ing for the play­ers it will be set­ting a dan­ger­ous prece­dent in the fu­ture. “We are not ob­lig­at­ed to pay any­body a stipend, num­ber one. Num­ber two, There are a few play­ers who have come to us and we have said to them that we’re not ob­lig­at­ed to pay a stipend. We have pre­sent­ed our bud­get to FI­FA for the year and it does not in­clude any­thing called a stipend.”

“So I am get­ting a lot of push-back on what this stipend thing is, and the prece­dent it would set for the fu­ture,” Hadad ex­plained.

Fen­wick’s train­ing squad com­pris­es more than 60 per­cent of young, new play­ers, most of whom are not at­tached to any clubs at this point in time.

Hadad said: “Re­mem­ber foot­ball is on­ly be­ing played like this, and a na­tion­al team is on­ly in train­ing be­cause there is no oth­er foot­ball al­lowed to be played. Once League starts back, whether it’s the Pro League, Su­per League or As­cen­sion League, all these play­ers that Ter­ry is sup­pos­ed­ly train­ing, should move on to play for their clubs, and at that point, they would get their salaries. In the now, in the sit­u­a­tion, we have been pre­sent­ed with, I have a bud­get and I have pre­sent­ed my bud­get to FI­FA. My bud­get has been ap­proved by FI­FA, but it does not in­clude stipend, so I am not go­ing to make promis­es to them that I can­not keep.”

Foot­ball in T&T has en­dured its rough­est time to date, with of­fi­cials from Ue­fa, FI­FA and CON­CA­CAF pro­vid­ing in­put in a ma­jor re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise in 2019. And though no progress was made, the sport was fur­ther hit hard by the out­break of the coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) pan­dem­ic which brought sports gen­er­al­ly to a stop across the na­tion.

The T&T team be­gan its cam­paign suc­cess­ful­ly against Guyana on March 25 with a more-than-con­vinc­ing 3-0 vic­to­ry in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic. The So­ca War­riors, as they are af­fec­tion­ate­ly called fol­lowed that re­sult up with a 1-1 tie with Puer­to Ri­co ion Mayaguez, a re­sult that placed them in sec­ond po­si­tion in Group F with four points.

The group is be­ing led by St Kitts/Nevis who has an un­blem­ished record of two wins from as many games. The oth­er team in the group is the Ba­hamas who are bot­tom of the ta­ble with­out a win or a draw to their name.

T&T are sched­uled to play against the Ba­hami­ans and St Kitts/Nevis in their next two match­es on June 5 and June 8 re­spec­tive­ly.

On­ly re­cent­ly mid­field­er Du­ane Muck­ette said four points out of six was not bad at all, but they live and they have more games ahead to make amends.