LOC Agreements Reached for Practice Venues

The Jamaica Local Organising Committee (LOC) is reporting that it has reached full agreements with all the owners of facilities to be used as practice venues during the Cricket World Cup 2007 (CWC) 2007.The venues include Chedwin Park in St. Catherine, Kensington Park in Kingston, Kaiser Sports Club in St. Ann and Jarrett Park in St. James.
This disclosure was made by Robert Bryan, Executive Director of the Jamaica LOC, at a press briefing held at the offices of Jamaica Promotions Corporation (JAMPRO) in Kingston on November 25.
He informed that the work to upgrade the facilities was scheduled to commence shortly, in order to meet the required standard in the stipulated time period.This comes as good news, because the ICC CWC 2007, Venue Director, Don Lockerbie has expressed concern about the state of readiness of practice pitches in Jamaica as well as in the other host countries for the event.
“Right now, just to be clear, we have made a very strict demand on all LOCs and here in Jamaica, specifically on the two stadiums, that we need to have pitches that can perform,” he emphasised at a press conference after an inspection of the multipurpose stadium in Trelawny by ICC Officials and stakeholders.
“We have been told by the experts that they are pretty pleased right now with the pitch squares, but most of the outfields need a lot of work,”Mr. Lockerbie added.
He attributed the problem to the fact that the LOCs have been mostly focused on building the “fabulous monuments” that the region has as stadia, in order to host some 51 matches and 16 warm up matches during the Cricket World Cup.
Commenting further on the necessity of having good practice venues, the Venue Director explained that more than 750 training sessions were pre-arranged by the Cricket Operations team.
“So when you think about the two months that players are here in the region, and the ones who make the finals in 11 matches. they will train some part of 25 to 40 times and that is an enormous amount of wear and tear on the facilities that have had trouble just being first class grounds in general,” he said.There are 22 such venues to be used in the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 and this is in addition to 12 new stadia.
“We are really going to have to focus on making sure that these heavily used training grounds are not only operating well and performing well, but are special places in their own right,” Mr. Lockerbie stressed.
Agreements have been reached and executed for the other critical sites for the venue operation at Sabina Park. These include Emmett Park, the Holy Trinity School grounds and the lands to locate the search park on South Camp Road. The LOC will take possession of Emmett Park on December 1.