England's Jamie Dalrymple (right) plays a shot as Bermuda's Dean Minors watches during their World Cup cricket warm-up match at Arnos Vale in Kingstown yesterday. Dalrymple made 76. - Reuters

Audley Boyd, Asst Sport Editor

A number of people assigned to work at the warm-up ICC WI CWC 2007 match between the West Indies and Kenya at the Trelawny Multi-Purpose Stadium could not gain access to the facility yesterday morning as their accreditation was not prepared.

Potentially, it threatened to delay proceedings as many of the people were ground staffers.

It led organisers, including Michael Hall, director of Cricket Operations ICC WI CWC 2007, to physically put his hands to the wheel and get assistance from persons accredited for other stuff to as much as remove the covers from the pitch, to ensure there were no glitches to smirk the face of the game's showpiece event at its official start-up.

An some people were eventually accredited in abnormal circumstances with their names hand written on passes which bore no picture, Dr. Wayne Reid, chairman of Jamaica Cricket 2007 Limited, the Local Organising Committee (LOC), was clearly upset.

Problem

"One of the problems that we've had is the matter of accreditation," Dr. Reid told The Gleaner while commenting generally on how the day's activities and their plans had unfurled.

"It has not gone off as well as we wanted, and it has delayed the deployment of our people, including the groundsmen here this morning. "It had Mike (Michael) Hall from (CWC) here pulling covers off the pitch this morning for a simple reason, our people couldn't get accredited to go out there."

Hall, who has overall responsibilities for cricket operations regionally, noted the problem when addressing general start-up matters.

He said: "We had some issues here this morning in Trelawny with accrediting our ground staff and getting them in at the time we'd have liked. But everything worked out just fine in the end.

Pleased but...

"The game started on time, the folks have seen some good cricket and everything involved in cricket operations, delivery of matches has really gone according to plan, butoverall I'm pleased, but not relaxing because we still have a long way to go."

A notable personality among those not properly accredited included, of all people, Oneil Cruickshank, the Cricket Operations Manager for the LOC, whose identification included no picture and was hand written.

Dr. Reid attested to this back-up method, saying: "If you look around the place quite a number of the accreditation passes are hand written and that is not something that should happen.

"You can't be planning for something for over three years and then end up with hand written accreditation sorted on the day."

Commenting further, he says the situation needs to be addressed quickly as it has implications for Sunday's opening ceremony.

"I trust that they will have it in proper functioning order by tomorrow because it's not only the people for the daily operations here, but some of the people who have to come in to start setting up, doing the preparatory work for the opening ceremony on Sunday," he pointed out.

... Organisers point to late applications

In a release yesterday evening ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 blamed the problems on the lateness of thousands of applications from a large number of stakeholders involved in the event.

"It would appear that despite our best efforts over the past two years, including a tailored accreditation education programme, briefing stakeholders in all host nations, many people did not appreciate the stringent requirements of a world event's accreditation system," stated Mandy Keegan, accreditation programme manager.

"We have a very clear policy for accreditation to this event and everyone applying for accreditation must complete a registration and receive authorisation from a senior representative before being submitted for security screening. This process is not one that can be turned around in a matter of minutes, hence the setting of such early deadlines to accommodate these security requirements."

Security screening

The release said security screening is being undertaken by the police forces across the region which involve thorough background checks and these can take up to five days. It added that this process is being expedited to accommodate late accreditation requests.

Yesterday, the release said, a high number of 'essential operational' staff who had not applied in time for accreditation were issued with temporary accreditation passes at yesterday's warm-up match at Trelawny. These passes will be replaced with full passes once the screening formalities have been completed.