"Come on and sup­port the Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee, it hap­pened to us al­so and now we are bet­ter off."

This has been the ad­vice of Clin­ton Url­ing, for­mer chair­man of the 2014 FI­FA Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee ap­point­ed in Guyana, to the oust­ed T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) ex­ec­u­tive be­ing led by William Wal­lace.

Url­ing sought to clear the air on whether it was the world gov­ern­ing body for the sport of foot­ball, FI­FA, which puts out the fund­ing in the case of a nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee sce­nario to clear the debt of the TTFA, or if it was in­cum­bent of the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee to come up with in­no­v­a­tive ideas, as well as source fund­ing.

He told Guardian Me­dia Sports on Fri­day that the chair­man of the FI­FA ap­point­ed nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee Robert Hadad will have 100 per cent pow­er, dis­cre­tion and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to come up with ini­tia­tives and plans to solve the is­sues of the em­bat­tled foot­ball ad­min­is­tra­tion and FI­FA will check it first, be­fore pro­vid­ing the funds.

Of­fi­cials of the foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion re­cent­ly raised con­cerns about the lit­tle to no progress the com­mit­tee has had to date un­der Hadad, a con­cern that comes al­most two months af­ter FI­FA, on March 17, agreed to im­ple­ment the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee in T&T, based on the bur­den­ing debt that was said to be some $50 mil­lion and no means or mea­sures to put the as­so­ci­a­tion back on a sta­ble foot­ing.

Hadad, who was ap­point­ed along­side his deputy Judy Daniel, an At­tor­ney and en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist, and Nigel Ro­mano, who is a re­tired banker, has since en­coun­tered steady re­sis­tance from Wal­lace and his team of vice pres­i­dents Clynt Tay­lor, Joseph Sam Phillips and Su­san Joseph-War­rick, for use of the TTFA let­ter­head and to se­cure use of the TTFA’s bank ac­counts, as well as emerg­ing con­cerns from new con­trac­tors claim­ing monies from work done on the con­tro­ver­sial "Home of Foot­ball" in Bal­main, Cou­va.

Url­ing said while he does not want to im­pose, he be­lieves that Wal­lace and his team should join forces with Hadad and his team if they re­al­ly love the sport of foot­ball and the coun­try, say­ing in Guyana they had to do the same thing.

“In fact, the sit­u­a­tion in Guyana was worse than what we see in T&T. The nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee brings a sort of in­flu­ence for the busi­ness and oth­er com­mu­ni­ties and it is a tremen­dous help. Back home, it helped us with se­cur­ing spon­sors and land etc. We just had to work with the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee and in­stead of the two years giv­en, we were able to turn the sport around in a year.”

Url­ing then turned to Wal­lace and com­pa­ny, say­ing it is use­less try­ing to fight FI­FA through the Court of Ar­bi­tra­tion for Sport (CAS) in Switzer­land, as the sport’s gov­ern­ing body act­ed with­in its le­gal right to ap­point a com­mit­tee.

“There is no oth­er doc­u­ment clear­er than the FI­FA Statutes, so I can’t un­der­stand why a le­gal per­son would at­tempt to con­vince the TTFA mem­bers that they have a fight­ing chance. The fact is that they can­not win the FI­FA. Okay, let's say that the TTFA wins the FI­FA at the CAS, then the FI­FA would sim­ply in­voke its clause that refers to no po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence and still ban the TTFA. Who is to say they would not do it, they have done it be­fore, so who suf­fers then, isn’t it the coun­try and the sport.”

“I sym­pa­thise with Wal­lace and his team, I know how they feel, but emo­tions have no place in law. In fact, I could re­call back in 2015, there were talks to ap­point a nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee in T&T un­der the then pres­i­dent Ray­mond Tim Kee, so it re­al­ly does not make a dif­fer­ence if it is ap­point­ed now.”

Url­ing, a busi­ness­man by pro­fes­sion said his main con­cern is if the sport will be prop­er­ly man­aged af­ter the ex­it of the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee in two years, say­ing the TTFA must de­ter­mine where the debt came from in the first place so that the man­agers of the sport don’t fall back in­to the same prob­lems they are fac­ing now.