Wednesday, May 16 2007

click on pic to zoom in

« prev photo next photo »

The Government of Trinidad and Tobago had invested $15 million but will get only $1.5 million in return from the revenue collected during the cricket World Cup in the Caribbean.

Roger Boynes, minister of sports and youth affairs of Trinidad and Tobago, said that based on an agreement between the International Cricket Council (ICC), the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the nine host countries, gate receipts will be returned to each of the hosts to help defray the high costs of staging the tournament.

Chief Executive Officer of the Local Organising Committee, Anand Daniel, said that he was pleased with the work of the committee in turning around the Brown Package (World Cup Group B matches) awarded to this twin-island republic.

“We had to deal with the fact that we got the Brown Package and people were saying all kinds of things. We decided to adopt the mantra of changing the Brown Package into the Gold Package and this we did very well,” Daniel told the media.

Daniel said that the combined capacity of the Queen’s Park Oval for the six World Cup matches was 99,000, and of this just under 50,000 tickets were sold for the matches.

He also said that for the warm up matches, the response was encouraging.

“We had a combined capacity of 16,000 for the four matches at the Sir Frank Worrel Ground at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine and of this just over 13,000 tickets were sold. We had sold out one match and that was for the South Africa/Pakistan match.”

Daniel said that ICC’s chief executive officer Malcolm Speed, in a communication, expressed delight in how Trinidad and Tobago hosted its part of the World Cup.