Min­is­ter of Sports and Youth Af­fairs Sham­fa Cud­joe has called on all foot­ball stake­hold­ers to come to­geth­er in the in­ter­est of restor­ing the sport to its for­mer glo­ry days.

On Mon­day in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia Sports she said her gov­ern­ment was not in a po­si­tion to bail out the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (TTFA) and if there's as­sis­tance com­ing from the par­ent body (FI­FA) con­cern­ing deal­ing with the fi­nan­cial af­fairs with­in the em­bat­tled foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion, straight­en­ing things out and putting the as­so­ci­a­tion on sta­ble foot­ing, then all should join in and help where nec­es­sary.

There has been a bat­tle for the right to man­age the af­fairs of the sport by the oust­ed Unit­ed TTFA group, which com­pris­es pres­i­dent William Wal­lace and vice pres­i­dents Clynt Tay­lor, Sam Phillips and Su­san Joseph War­rick, all of whom were re­placed by a FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee on March 17. The sport’s gov­ern­ing body felt the or­gan­i­sa­tion was on the verge of in­sol­ven­cy due to a $50 mil­lion debt, cou­pled with an in­abil­i­ty to show pro­grammes and poli­cies that could pay the debt and steer it on­to sta­ble foot­ing.

Wal­lace and his team have since agreed to chal­lenge the ap­point­ment of the com­mit­tee through their lawyer Matthew Gayle through the Court of Ar­bi­tra­tion for Sports (CAS) in Lau­sanne, Switzer­land.

"I think FI­FA and the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee through Robert Hadad, has come to as­sist and I think those who are in po­si­tions to as­sist should jump on board and as­sist," said Cud­joe adding that she was not pick­ing sides but be­lieves every­one who has the abil­i­ty or au­thor­i­ty to bring some sort of peace to this sit­u­a­tion, should work to­geth­er to re­store foot­ball.

"I see the work­ers and the tech­ni­cal peo­ple at the TTFA would have start­ed es­tab­lish­ing some strate­gies along­side the Hadad com­mit­tee and I think that is some­thing good. The tug-of-war and the throw­ing of words, the bac­cha­nal on Face­book and on so­cial me­dia, does not help any­body. It doesn’t help the TTFA, it doesn’t help FI­FA and it cer­tain­ly doesn’t help the ath­letes who are de­pend­ing on this sport as a means of liveli­hood and as a means of in­come gen­er­a­tor.”

She ex­plained fur­ther that the sport has been tar­nished and de­stroyed by per­son­al egos, and a crav­ing for pow­er, de­scrib­ing it as a back and forth with threats to go to court, as it re­lates to who is in charge and who is not, etc.

Cud­joe said her on­ly hope is that the nec­es­sary stake­hold­ers would come to­geth­er and fo­cus more on solv­ing the prob­lem at hand so that they can look back at deal­ing with ar­eas of de­vel­op­ment, at foot­ball touch­ing the com­mu­ni­ties and ath­letes, who de­pend on the sport, to live.