T&T will not be field­ing teams at the Un­der-14 Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU) Boys and Girls Tour­na­ments in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic lat­er this week due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

T&T was set to be among 13 oth­er na­tions to con­test the tour­na­ments which are be­ing used for de­vel­op­ment. The tour­na­ments catered for boys and girls born on or af­ter Jan­u­ary 1, 2006 and 2007, re­spec­tive­ly. They (the com­pe­ti­tions) were post­poned from last year (2020).

The teams are ex­pect­ed to ar­rive in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic over the course of Thurs­day and Fri­day for the start of com­pe­ti­tion on Au­gust 22, with both fi­nals set for Au­gust 29.

How­ev­er, act­ing Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary of the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion Amiel Mo­hammed said they de­clined the in­vi­ta­tion to send teams due to all the un­cer­tain­ty sur­round­ing the T&T bor­der re-open­ing at the time they had to con­firm at­ten­dance.

He (Mo­hammed) con­firmed, how­ev­er, that the in­vi­ta­tion was heav­i­ly con­sid­ered.

Ac­cord­ing to Mo­hammed: "The fact that we have had no teams in that brack­et train­ing or be­ing gen­er­al­ly ac­tive with SOE, hav­ing very lit­tle time to pre­pare, the threat of vari­ants and ex­pos­ing young ath­letes to the rigours of hav­ing to nav­i­gate com­pet­i­tive sport in these pan­dem­ic en­vi­ron­ments, it was de­cid­ed that it wouldn't be best for the play­ers."

T&T was among teams such as re­gion­al ri­vals Ja­maica, Aru­ba, Haiti, St Mar­tin (FR.) Bonaire, Turks and Caicos Is­lands, Cu­ra­cao, Puer­to Ri­co, Unit­ed States Vir­gin Is­lands, Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, St. Kitts and Nevis, Grena­da and St. Lu­cia to com­pete.

A re­lease yes­ter­day stat­ed that the com­pe­ti­tions are de­signed to aid de­vel­op­ment with­in the Caribbean Foot­ball Union (CFU) and are open to par­tic­i­pa­tion of the thir­ty-one (31) Mem­ber As­so­ci­a­tions with­in the CFU body.