Pres­i­dent of the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU), Randy Har­ris be­lieves that the re­gion needs to un­der­stand the role of FI­FA in foot­ball a lot more and that Trinidad and To­ba­go may have been spared in the past but not now.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with An­dre Er­rol Bap­tiste on is­ports on i95.5fm on Sat­ur­day, Har­ris re­it­er­at­ed his call for the re­gion to get its af­fairs in or­der.

“I be­lieve that look­ing from the out­side, that FI­FA was giv­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go a Bligh as we say in the Caribbean be­cause of the home of foot­ball, it was sup­posed to be a rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing, in­come project but it was closed. But all of us are an­swer­able to FI­FA and from time to time, all of us are in sit­u­a­tions that have to be reg­u­lar­ized,” said Har­ris

“Fi­fa is very se­ri­ous about how they op­er­ate in the Caribbean, if they are giv­ing you these an­nu­al sums of monies, you have to be ac­count­able. It hap­pens to all of us, there are al­ways ques­tions be­ing asked,” ex­plained Har­ris.

On March 17, Fi­fa an­nounced that it was im­ple­ment­ing a Nor­mal­iza­tion Com­mit­tee (NC) to run the foot­ball af­fairs of Trinidad and To­ba­go, re­plac­ing the du­ly elect­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion led at the time by pres­i­dent William Wal­lace, who has chal­lenged FI­FA's de­ci­sion since then in every as­pect of TTFA's op­er­a­tions.

Speak­ing about the up­com­ing CFU, Har­ris said,” It is an Ex­Co meet­ing and at the mo­ment, Trinidad and To­ba­go do not have a rep­re­sen­ta­tive on the Ex­Co of which Fi­fa is the World Gov­ern­ing body, they will de­cide who will rep­re­sent T&T, not the CFU. At the mo­ment and un­til we are told some­thing dif­fer­ent, it will be the Nor­mal­iza­tion Com­mit­tee.”

Asked if as CFU Pres­i­dent if he has spo­ken with mem­bers of the Nor­mal­iza­tion Com­mit­tee which are head­ed by busi­ness­man Robert Hadad, Har­ris said, "The NC has not reached out to the CFU. The CFU will wait un­til the sit­u­a­tion is set­tled. There's a lot of re­ports, but most seem to be po­lit­i­cal. For right now, I pre­fer to stay out­side. It's Fi­fa Mat­ter, a T&TFA mat­ter.”

Har­ris said that just be­fore FI­FA stepped in he had reached out to William Wal­lace de­spite claims by Trinidad and To­ba­go that the CFU was dead. He said, "We are work­ing for the bet­ter­ment of foot­ball in the re­gion. CFU is uni­fied con­trary to many per­sons say­ing oth­er­wise."

Wal­lace and his vice pres­i­dents Tay­lor, Phillips and Joseph-War­rick are chal­leng­ing FI­FA de­ci­sion to re­move them from of­fice on March 17, and ap­point­ment of the Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee on March 27 to run the af­fairs of T&T foot­ball, through the Court of Ar­bi­tra­tion for Sports (CAS) in Lau­sanne, Switzer­land. The for­mer ex­ec­u­tive mem­bers are al­so locked in a bat­tle with the sport bankers First Cit­i­zens bank for con­trol of the ac­counts.