Orin Gordon
The last time Trinidad and Tobago qualified for a world cup, 2006 in Germany, I went to all of their matches – including the last one in Kaiserslautern, a small town close to France and behind God back, as we say.
For accredited reporters, travel was free on Germany’s excellent train service, the Intercity Express (ICE). Pre-Brexit, my UK passport got me automatic entry into Germany. The hundreds of Soca Warriors fans and officials in Germany didn’t appear to have difficulty getting Schengen visas.
Tournament hosting agreements require hassle-free travel guarantees to FIFA, particularly for athletes and officials. The heavy hand of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on spectators, officials, journalists and even football players, operates against the letter and spirit of these agreements.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino pointed out, correctly, that final decisions on entry are up to host nations. Let’s also try to see things from the DHS’s point of view. The US is engaged militarily in a number of places, and caution about some people arriving to potentially conduct acts of terrorism is understandable.
However, the DHS’s treatment of some arriving for the tournament was inexcusable. Somali referee Omar Artan, regarded as Africa’s most highly-qualified, had been issued a US visa in Kenya long before he tried to travel to the US. On arrival in Miami, he was subjected to 11 hours of questioning and refused entry. The DHS’s belated justification was that Artan had suspected associations with groups/individuals suspected of terrorism. The Nairobi consulate had made a contradictory determination… Artan had met the requirements for a visa after a background check.
The scale of DHS actions – from visa revocations, to visa denials, to long and onerous searches and detentions of players and officials holding valid visas – required a much stronger response from Infantino than a shrug.
For the 2007 Cricket World Cup, eight Caribbean host countries and two others created a temporary Single Domestic Space, which allowed travellers to move freely without having their passports stamped in every country. Visitors from outside the region were required to obtain a Caricom Special Visa. Once that visitor cleared immigration at, say, Norman Manley, s/he could move around the region – Port-of-Spain, Bridgetown, Georgetown, St Georges, wherever – passport free.
The fine legal minds at Caricom would tell you that the provisions were complex, required legislative assent across independent sovereign nations, and needed to be sunset (in mid-May 2007 when the tournament ended). For me, an institutionally-inert Caricom missed a great opportunity – one that’s belatedly being grasped by some countries.
The ICC got other things out of us. We had to retire old fire traps such as GCC Ground Bourda and the Antigua Recreation Ground (ARG). Safety and comfort. If you wanted to take a pee while watching test cricket in the South Stand at Bourda, you had to do so in the open – behind the stands and against the fence.
When the cricket got exciting, the packed, wooden, double-decker Clive Lloyd stand rocked. Literally. As did the stand in which legendary Gravy performed at the ARG. Gravy was a flashily-dressed one-man entertainment cabaret, who performed between deliveries and in time to the music of Chickie’s Hi-Fi. Gravy could wine while doing handstands.
Medical facilities had to be upgraded to as close to first-world standards of care and response as possible. The Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO) estimated at the time that the region invested US$1 billion into levelling for the cup.
“There’s no doubt… that a number of the projects that are being developed now either would not have happened or would have happened a long time down the road,” then-chief Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace told me in 2006.
The stakes are enormous. Governing bodies such the ICC, International Olympic Committee (IOC) and FIFA wield tremendous power. Close to tournament time, FIFA effectively runs countries and bosses governments. The United States may be football’s great white whale, but (as the International Criminal Court has found out) she’s too big, rich and powerful to bracket with everyone else. While the US hosted the World Cup in 1994, her current president considers half of the world to be “s***hole countries”.
No amount of obsequious flattery by Infantino – who created the mock-worthy FIFA Peace Prize specially for Trump – was going to change that.
