By Emmerson Campbell
The 23rd Kashif and Shanghai (K&S)and the second annual Banks/Georgetown Football Association (GFA) tournaments both kicked off Sunday night at adjacent venues and will continue to attract fans on the same playing days until both tournaments culminate on January 1 next year.
While the K&S games were being played at the Georgetown Football Club (GFC) ground, the Banks/GFA matches were being staged simultaneously, next door at the Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC) ground.
How this scenario affects both tournaments could be judged on attendance and ticket sales.
However, co-founder of the K&S tournament, Kashif Muhammad and GFA’s Vice President in charge of competitions, Mark Phillips, had different views about the tournaments running simultaneously.
“I think both tournaments can survive to be quite honest,” said Philips during an interview with Stabroek Sport on Tuesday.
“I don’t understand why the K&S Organization is making a big deal out of it because in Guyana, we don’t have 3000 football fans that will go to football games every Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Those are the days that football is played and there is no way if there are two tournaments in that same month that there would not be clashes. That is impossible,” Philips declared.
“They (K&S) have their crowd, we have our crowd, if 20,000 people have to go to football on New Year’s Day, they get 10,000 people, and GFA gets 10,000 people. I think that is fair but the fact that we cannot play two tournaments at the same time I cannot understand why people are saying that, I am in business where I am competing against thousands of store owners and every body is surviving,” he added.
Philips backed up his words by justifying the reason why the GFA tournament is being staged simultaneously with the K&S tournament.
“The fact in this matter is we were treated badly by our parent association the GFF and K&S took the side of the GFF hence the reason why we at the GFA decided to keep our own tournament because our teams were not invited to the K&S tournament,” was his take.
Muhammad, however, stated that the situation was unhealthy for the already divided sport of local football and that the fans will be the ones suffering the most.
“It is not good for football because the fans will suffer, we have teams that the fans want to see while they have teams that people want to see at the same time. The fans should be able to see all the games. We have established our tournament for 23 years now and it is not fair for this to be occurring,” said Muhammad.
He said that his organization has tried to iron out the issues relating to the saga but failed to find common ground with the GFA adding that football’s world governing body FIFA, will soon intervene in the matter.
“We tried the sit down thing. It did not work. We need to get football in Guyana back to normalcy and with the help of FIFA, who will intervene, that will happen,” Muhammad assured. The co-founder of the long running tournament also touched on Sunday night’s launch as well as the remainder of the competition. “Our launch was successful. We had a nice launch, all the teams showed up and we had two great games. We know it is going to be a great tournament.”
Action for both tournaments continues today.
