HALL

Audley Boyd, Assistant Sport Editor

FLORENCE HALL, Trelawny:

SOME SPECIALLY arranged flights have been chartered to get teams from Jamaica to match venues in other regional territories on time for ICC WI CWC 2007 contests.

All 16 participants in the cricket masterpiece will be in the island to participate in Sunday's opening ceremony, no later than Saturday. The teams are divided into groups of four for first round competition, and on Monday, 12 must leave here for their opening first-round assignments in St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia.

"There's a programme in place that involves some dedicated flights for the teams," Michael Hall, director of cricket operations for the ICC WI CWC 2007, told The Gleaner.

"Four teams will leave here on Monday and go to Kingston, four will go to St. Kitts, four will go to Trinidad and four will go to St. Lucia," he said.

Special flights

"Those flights have been specially scheduled, those flights belong to Cricket World Cup and they'll move at the designated time, there will be no delays," stressed Hall.

He further explained that other things are being done to facilitate smooth and timely movement of the teams, to eliminate jet lag.

"One of the things we've done to mitigate the logistical challenge is to move the teams' kits from their warm-up venue straight to their group venue and those flights are also part of the tournament flight rotation.

"We're not leaving anything to chance, we pretty much put everything into place, it's just to execute come Monday."

Of the countries playing outside Jamaica, Australia, Scotland, Kenya and Canada have the tightest air schedules as they are down to play matches in groups A and C respectively on Wednesday; regional airlines have been awarded the contract to deliver the job.

"These are the regional carriers, Air Jamaica, Liat and Caribbean Airlines, formerly BWIA," Hall said. "We have chartered the aircraft from them and they are bringing them to the departure destination at the time that we have asked them, so it's a combination of regularly scheduled services and legs on which we have bought out the seats."

To ensure that players don't have to wake up early to travel, Hall explained that they had set flight times after 10:00 a.m.

"What we have done also is to try, as much as possible, to eliminate any instances of those 5:30 (a.m.) wake up to go and catch a plane situations. Most of the flights don't move before 10:30-11:00, so players can have a bit of sleep before they move on to the next stage."

In terms of their arrival, Hall said things went well.

"All of the 16 teams are here (in the Caribbean) now and they have been here for the past four, five days.

"We were very happy with their arrival into the Caribbean, they all seem to have gotten in smoothly."

Ground transportation

He added: "(There were) 1400 pieces of baggage coming in with all the teams, none (were) lost, everybody settled into their accommodation nicely, the ground transportation arrangements were in place, all the teams and the squad members got their meal allowances, they get to their practices on time, everything was done on time."

There is a certain standard required by the ICC for practice pitches and Hall said they had 'few issues' which had been dealt with.

"There was some indication from one of the teams in Trinidad that the wicket perhaps was not as good as they would have thought - or would have liked, but it was investigated for us by the ICC pitch consultant who happened to be in Trinidad at the time and he reported that perhaps it wasn't as bad as might have been suggested and subsequent to that there have been three practices at that venue and everything has been fine. I would say that was just a minor street bump."

Regarding the opening warm-up match at Trelawny on Monday and others across the region, Hall said he was pleased, but not relaxing.

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