FIFA happy with Centre of Excellence

TRINIDAD and Tobago FIFA vice-president and CONCACAF boss Jack Austin Warner, was happy the Dr Joao Havelange Centre of Excellence facility pleased a six-member FIFA fact-finding mission. But he expressed great disappointment  that Trinidad and Tobago is yet to get their Goal Project off the ground.

This Goal Project is supposed to involve the construction of a national training centre at Forest Reserve, Fyzabad. And the reason put forward for the project’s stalling is government’s delay in making the land at Forest Reserve available to the Trinidad and Tobago Football Federation (TTFF). The FIFA delegation left here last week impressed with the facilities at the Centre of Excellence at Macoya, Tunapuna, and indicated their intention to have the other confederations follow suit in establishing similar sites. Urs Zanitti,  head of the FIFA Goal Department held meetings with Warner and local Goal development officer Keith Look Loy with discussions centred around  planning the programme for the next two-three years.

Accompanying Zanitti were Tamara Martin, FIFA’s Goal representative for South America/Oceania; Claudio Pilot (Central America, Caribbean and Europe); Hugo Salcedo, Development Officer from Guatemala; Glenn Turner, Development Officer from Auckland, New Zealand,  and Harold Mayne-Nicholls of Paraguay. Warner said: “The $400,000 Goal Project money has languished for over two years and they (FIFA) opted to give it to Jamaica instead. “They (Jamaica) will be turning their sod in September for their Goal facility. When we are ready for this, then we shall start our project. “I don’t know why it takes so long to do anything in this country. Every other country has started their project and have been fully operational. We have to get the land from the government because FIFA won’t buy it for us. “What they want is to have other Confederations to replicate what we have here,” Warner said. The Goal Project was initiated by FIFA president Sepp Blatter and ratified at the extraordinary congress in July 1999. Goal offers tailor-made programmes that are cut out to suit the individual country’s needs and then implemented  by FIFA experts in close corporation with the national associations.