Tarouba Stadium worries ICC

THE BRIAN Lara Stadium in Tarouba is the only one of four cricketing venues which came close under scrutiny from a two-member International Cricket Council (ICC) inspection team which toured Trinidad yesterday. But Anand Daniel, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), said that “we know we’re a bit late on the Brian Lara Stadium but we’re getting things back on track.” The venues are either being built or upgraded ahead of the 2007 ICC Cricket World Cup, which will run from February until April of that year. Daniel noted that the ICC team of Andy Atkinson, a pitch and field expert, and mahesh Parmer, a venue development manager of the firm SKM (contracted by the ICC), were notified that persistent rainfall in November hampered the development work at Tarouba.

But, with the steady improvement of the weather conditions, the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (Udecott), who are overseeing the construction process, are moving feverously to get things completed by the December 2006 deadline. Assisting the ICC team yesterday were LOC members Marcus Knaggs and Ann Browne-John, operations site manager. Daniel revealed that Atkinson and Parmer were impressed with the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain, the first venue visited by the team. A practice match will be arranged in February to test the readiness of the facility before the Digicel Series against Zimbabwe and India in April-May. From the Oval, the party headed west to the Sir Frank Worrell Grounds at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Campus, St Augustine, followed by the Tarouba site in South Trinidad and the National Cricket Centre in Couva.

The venues at UWI and Couva which will stage practice games ahead of the tournament. Overall, Daniel said that the group are only concerned with the progress at Tarouba and will be encouraging the LOC to keep up with deadline date. From March 5-9 2007, the Tarouba Stadium will be the scene for Group WD, with warm-up matches involving South Africa, Canada, Pakistan and Ireland while the Queen’s Park Oval hosts Group “C” in the First Round phase from March 13-25, featuring Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Bermuda. The ICC duo will leave this morning for neighbouring Guyana, following which they will head to Barbados. Atkinson and Parmer will pay another visit to Trinidad at the end of January.