Foot­ball will re­turn to Skin­ner Park in San Fer­nan­do on June 25 af­ter many years, when the South­ern Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion (SFA) opens its 2023 sea­son with a grand march­past and ex­hi­bi­tion game.

Since re­fur­bish­ment works halt­ed ac­tiv­i­ties at a fa­cil­i­ty con­sid­ered to be one of the ma­jor sports fa­cil­i­ties in the South­land, the foot­ball field is set to be used again but on a small­er scale.

New pres­i­dent Den­nis Lat­iff said the plan is to play an ex­hi­bi­tion match at the fa­cil­i­ty.

How­ev­er, re­cent changes in the di­men­sions of the field have moved it away from be­ing of stan­dard FI­FA reg­u­la­tions.

Lat­iff, who de­feat­ed Bri­an Jor­dan in an elec­tion on April 29 for the post of pres­i­dent of south­ern foot­ball, said they have been check­ing the fa­cil­i­ty to de­ter­mine how the game can be played there. “It maybe will have to be played on a small­er scale,” Lat­iff said.

The open­ing will fea­ture 16 se­nior di­vi­sion teams, as well as oth­er teams in the un­der-13, un­der-15, and un­der-17 di­vi­sions, all in­volved in a March­past pa­rade.

The for­mat of the tour­na­ment is al­so still be­ing worked out, but Lat­iff said the se­nior di­vi­sion will com­prise two groups of eight teams each.

From a round-robin play-off, ei­ther the top two teams will ad­vance to the semi­fi­nals or the top four teams will progress to a quar­ter­fi­nal play-off. “All these things are be­ing worked out right now. We are plan­ning to have 144 match­es in the se­nior di­vi­sion this sea­son. We will al­so have in­di­vid­ual prizes for play­ers and dif­fer­ent com­pe­ti­tions.”

“We are al­so putting things in place for a Women’s League in the south­land. That league may not come out this year, but we have a team of peo­ple com­pris­ing Der­nelle Mas­call, the for­mer na­tion­al women’s coach, Pre­ston Nanan, Mo­han Per­sad and Aly­wyn Fer­gu­son, all putting that in place. It’s un­like­ly we will have any com­pe­ti­tion among the women this year but would put things in place for a start next year,” Lat­iff ex­plained.

The lo­cal foot­ball boss was ex­pect­ed to meet with Robert Hadad, chair­man of the FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee to dis­cuss what is or what can be avail­able for south­ern foot­ball this year.

He did not re­lease in­for­ma­tion about the prize struc­ture, say­ing it is cur­rent­ly be­ing worked out.

Ac­cord­ing to Lat­iff, his as­so­ci­a­tion’s fo­cus will be chan­nelled to­ward over­all de­vel­op­ment. He not­ed that work is be­ing done to en­sure that all teams are ful­ly com­pli­ant ac­cord­ing to the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion and CON­CA­CAF and that his se­nior di­vi­sion will be aligned with the T&T Su­per League or Tier 2, or Tier 1 of the T&T Pre­mier Foot­ball League to en­sure that there is con­stant progress among the teams.