President of the club, Devin Munroe told Stabroek Sport in an interview on Wednesday that the club is using whatever “little” resources are available to develop the venue while the Local Organising Committee (LOC) is to come forward with assistance.
“We are honoured as a club to have been selected as a practice venue for the World Cup.
We here at Everest are anxious about the ICC CWC 2007 and want to assure you that we are doing our part to prepare for the event,” Munroe said.
The ECC along with the Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC) ground are on top of the list of practice venues for the super eight matches scheduled for the newly-built Providence Cricket Stadium in April.
Munroe said that the ground received a satisfactory grade when the last ICC team of officials visited the practice venue.
Since then, he said, he has been trying to get a sense of what are the club’s and the LOC’s responsibilities.
“We committed on this venture to work in collaboration with LOC to develop the facility; we tried to get a sense of what LOC’s responsibilities are and our responsibility,” he said, adding that the LOC has not been consistent with their responsibilities.
According to the Everest president, the LOC is responsible for drainage systems outside of the ground, behind the scoreboard and the dressing rooms while the club will deal with internal drainage, the club building and the fence.
“Generally we have a problem with drainage and they (the LOC) have committed to dealing with that,” he noted. “In terms of maintaining the building, the field of play and the immediate drainage, Everest have been doing their part.”
Munroe said that the club did a total termite treatment of the building and took it upon itself with help from Guyenterprise to build a new fence on the Carifesta end of the venue through marketing strategies.
“LOC committed to upgrading of our dressing rooms but to date that has not been done. We are also concerned about how they will compensate for the sponsorship we will loose as a result of our billboards around the ground,” Munroe stated.
He said that the LOC did mention that they will have dressing room tents around the ground to make up for indoor dressing rooms since most of the players tend to spend more time on the field than off during practice sessions.
The billboards and advertising signs around Everest attract several key sponsors to the ground.
However, only the official sponsors’ billboards for CWC 2007 can be on display during the event.
Munroe said that the club requested boards from the LOC to cover the existing billboards around the ground to facilitate the CWC sponsors advertisements but they have not received the hardware yet.
“We are genuinely concerned about the state of affairs right now. We have been talking to people at the LOC about the development of the club but it hasn’t been happening as we expected,” Munroe stressed.
The practice facility for CWC 2007 is one of many various aspects of the mega event that must be in place for the successful staging of the event.
