The mem­ber­ship of lo­cal foot­ball will again be called up­on to de­cide on the way for­ward.

On Fri­day, the T&T court is ex­pect­ed to rule in favour of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion, be­ing led by William Wal­lace, as the le­git­i­mate ad­min­is­tra­tors of TT foot­ball since the sport's world gov­ern­ing body FI­FA, did not sub­mit a de­fence in the mat­ter which comes up against Jus­tice Car­ol Gob­in in the T&T High Court.

Ramesh Ramd­han, who was sus­pend­ed by the FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee from hos post as Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary, said the TTFA has al­ready be­gun reach­ing out to their spon­sors to re­sume talks to pump mon­ey in­to T&T foot­ball and there­by jump-start ini­tial plans that they had.

The plan is to con­vince the mem­ber­ship that the sus­pen­sion hand­ed to the TTFA on Sep­tem­ber 24 for its fail­ure to drop a court bat­tle with FI­FA over the right to ap­point a nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee to man­age the sports for the next two years might be a bless­ing in dis­guise.

Ramd­han told Guardian Me­dia Sports yes­ter­day that said he has al­ready reached out to Pe­ter Miller, the con­tro­ver­sial TTFA mar­ket­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive to re­sume work, while the mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar Laven­der deal to con­struct a mul­ti-pur­pose sport­ing, com­mer­cial and res­i­den­tial fa­cil­i­ty above the Ari­ma Velo­drome, is still on the ta­ble for gov­ern­ment's in­volve­ment.

Ramd­han said apart from UK sports­wear firm Avec Sports and Ar­chi­tec­tur­al com­pa­ny Laven­der, which is al­so based in Lon­don, the TTFA has se­cured the sup­port of an­oth­er spon­sor by the name of Dan­ian Prescott, a US-based T&T sports­man who or­gan­is­es sport­ing events abroad.

Ac­cord­ing to Ramd­han, Prescott has a lot of spon­sors at his fin­ger­tip and wants to or­gan­ise a com­pre­hen­sive grass­roots foot­ball league in T&T with the spon­sors he has. The league will have at­trac­tive prize monies and a to­tal de­vel­op­ment for­mat. Apart from prize monies for the top teams, an All-Star team will al­so be se­lect­ed to vis­it Charleston Ath­let­ic Club in Eng­land at the end of the sea­son to play games there.

Ramd­han said once they can con­vince the mem­ber­ship at an Emer­gency Gen­er­al Meet­ing (EGM) to be called af­ter Fri­day's judge­ment, the TTFA will get the op­por­tu­ni­ty it wants to prop­er­ly re­struc­ture lo­cal foot­ball and in­tro­duce a com­pre­hen­sive de­vel­op­ment plan, dur­ing the pe­ri­od the coun­try would be serv­ing its sus­pen­sion.

"It was un­like­ly the coun­try would have qual­i­fied for the FI­FA 2022 World Cup in Qatar in any way, so the coun­try can put things in place for 2026 which is very re­al­is­tic. Once we bring the spon­sors back then we will have enough mon­ey to fund the lo­cal game and pay ad­di­tion­al bills. We will get foot­ball back on its feet bet­ter than be­fore. In fact, if bet­ter work was done on the Home of Foot­ball, then the fa­cil­i­ty could have been used to cre­ate a bio bub­ble," Ramd­han ex­plained.

The TTFA, as part of its grand plan to re­vive T&T foot­ball, was set to dis­man­tle the T&T Pro League and T&T Su­per League and re­place them with a Pre­mier and First Di­vi­sion tour­na­ments which were set to be giv­en prop­er names af­ter con­sul­ta­tion with the mem­ber­ship ear­li­er this year.

Ramd­han said it was on­ly Brent San­cho, the T&T Pro league chair­man and Ju­lia Bap­tiste, the act­ing Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) who have pre­vent­ed the start of the ac­tion.

"When we came in­to of­fice, our im­me­di­ate plans were to fire Lawrence due to his poor run of re­sults with the na­tion­al team and to dis­man­tle the T&T Pro League, as it had been any­thing but pro­gres­sive. It would have had prize monies, pro­mo­tion and de­mo­tion and tele­vi­sion rights, which would have been shared with the clubs. The on­ly thing we re­quest­ed was for the TTFA to man­age the com­pe­ti­tions and pay all the clubs, but the Pro League ex­ec­u­tives did not want that."