President of Fruta Conquerors Wayne Forde said the possibility exists the Tucville giants will not stage their eighth edition of the National Milling Company (NAMILCO) football festival this year.
Speaking exclusively with Stabroek Sports, he said: “The club and the sponsors have had several engagements with the Normalization Committee of the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) with regards to the event and we were unable to identify a specific period for hosting of the 2015 tournament.
“With some of the changes underway at the national level, both the club and the sponsors thought it was in the best interest to wait for the changes to take affect before we go ahead with the tournament.
“The way in which everything will be structured, we have to find a slot where the tournament can fit and right now it is not clear to find a slot to run the tournament how we want to run it,” he added.
Asked if the decision was influenced by the committee’s choice to award the time slot previously utilized to the Kashif and Shanghai Organization, he said: “We were not happy when the period that we thought we had secured with the previous body was allocated to the Kashif and Shanghai Organization.
“We made that point very clear to the members of the Normalization Committee that we were not happy. In turn they gave us the reasons as to why that occurred, they had pointed to us some of the other changes they will be effecting.”
According to Forde “We felt in the best interest of everyone to wait for these changes to take place. It is likely the structure, format and the whole concept of the tournament will change but we think it’s better to let the GFF programme and changes they are making to take root before we go ahead with our plans because what they do will have a significant impact on what we do.”
Questioned if the tourney could be hosted during a different time slot in the year, he said: “The year is still young, we are not ruling this year out completely, if for some reason we don’t host it, it will be staged next year.
“The issue really is the availability of teams because of the many tournaments the GFF wants to bring off and want the associations to bring off.”
He, however said that the event is very important as it is the club’s biggest fund-raiser and as such, they would not simply stage the event for the sake of it due to the possible financial consequences that can be accrued.
