Guyana stadium 'still not ready'

The Providence Stadium looked far from ready a month ago

Building work on the Providence Stadium in Guyana is still going on with the first World Cup match set to be played there on Wednesday.

World Cup organisers have taken over the responsibility of completing the $25 million project in Georgetown from the local organising committee.

There are issues over the security and crowd control turnstiles, accreditation facilities, scoreboards and power.

Six Super 8s matches are due to be staged between 28 March and 9 April.

South Africa are set to face Sri Lanka on Wednesday, with England scheduled to take on Ireland at the ground on Friday.

Guyana Sports Minister Frank Anthony and the World Cup's senior legal counsel Derek Jones sent a strongly worded letter to the local organising committee (LOC) for its "failure to proceed satisfactorily or effectively" in relation to the Host Venue Agreement (HVA).

The letter continued: "Your failure to deal adequately with these and other areas has resulted in Cricket World Cup 2007 being unable to have confidence in your ability to deliver a fully functional operating Super 8 venue in accordance with your contractual obligations."

LOC chief executive Karran Singh said the move to take responsibility away from them was "unwarranted" but he could not stop them from doing so.

He said: "We have done what we believe in our opinion is the best we can do to host the World Cup we will have the World Cup matches here in a few days."

Local newspaper reports say the Queen's Park Oval in Trinidad, which hosted group matches, and Jamaica's Trelawny Stadium, where warm-up games were played, have been put on standby to stage the matches should Providence Stadium not be ready.