Constellation $60,000 for Munroe Road

CONSTELLATION Travel Service are the new sponsors of Munroe Road cricket club. This was revealed at a press briefing at the club house in Cunupia on Friday morning.

Constellation will invest $60,000 in the development of the club for the 2004 season. On hand to deliver the feature address at the function was former West Indies vice-captain and wicketkeeper Deryck Murray. In his address he said: “You need youngsters to develop in order to take the sport forward in Trinidad and Tobago. In order to develop the youngsters you need financial help and sponsorship need to be a long term association. It is my hope that Constellation and Munroe Road will keep a very cordial relationship for a long while, so that they can see the benefits of their association. “Winning is all well and good but that is not the end of the road. It is how you win and how you lose that matters. Development has to be the key element and even if you are losing but seeing improvement you must not get dis-heartened.

“We have tremendous talent in the Caribbean and we must nurture this from young. We are only fooling ourselves by having academies when we are not teaching the proper basics. There is no sense in having an academy for players from the ages of 18 to 21 years. We cannot transform them from ordinary to excellent at this age. We need to start working and developing their talent from he age of 12 years. “It makes no sense having technology, when we cannot use it. We need to school ourselves. For example if we take Ato Boldon and Daryl Brown who are too very good runners and give them technical advice about cricket and mental preparation and so on, they could never be cricketers. You must have talent to work with and you must track the players for a number of seasons in order to get them to where you want. “The process of development needs all of us and we must do our part to take the game to the top again in the Caribbean.”

Munroe Road Cricket Club president Manohar Ramsaran said: “Cricketers should be given the say about cricket in the region. I am not surprise with the state of our cricket at the moment. Our national team continues to fail and I could understand why. If you look at the structure of our local cricket and examine it carefully you would see that there are only about eight teams from Port-of-Spain to Sangre Grande. This critical area produced so many good cricketers in the past and now cricket is dormant there. This will continue in this country until the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB) realise that Deryck Murray is the right man to be their leader.” Mujhtabah Mohammed director of Constellation Travel Service said that his company is not looking to gain anything out of the sponsorship. “We saw a need to help the youths and we have decided to put in some funds to help in their development.” Munroe Road currently campaigns in the second division of the Carib National league cricket series.