FLORENCE HALL, Trelawny – Assistant Commissioner of Police Owen Ellington wore a broad smile after yesterday’s Cricket World Cup opening ceremony at the newly built Trelawny Multi-purpose stadium here.

“We had no real security challenges in terms of the security operation,” he told the Observer. “It has gone very, very well, beginning with our pre-event security procedures, our access control. All of that went very well.”

In fact, the only issue Ellington’s team of state and private security personnel had to deal with was two cases of duplicated tickets. But that, said Ellington, who chairs the Local Organising Security Committee, could have resulted from “genuine errors from the ticketing section of the LOC and not cases of fraud”.

Wellington’s deputy, Senior Superintendent of Police in charge of traffic, Elan Powell, was just as pleased with traffic management for yesterday’s function, which was attended by the 16 participating teams and more than 15,000 spectators.

“The traffic flowed very well today (yesterday). We never had any undue delays,” said Powell. “The VIPs and all the teams got here on time and safely. And I think the patrons got to the venue in good time as well.”

Powell said preparation exercises for the event as well as the experience gained from the staging of the four warm-up games last week gave his team the necessary expertise to deal with yesterday’s heavy traffic.

“The fact is that we have done this before, not on the same magnitude, but we could say that last week’s four warm-up games served as a dress rehearsal for today’s opening ceremony.

Powell said, too that the 16-acre parking lot at the venue also helped. “We had a lot of parking spaces which we had not even exhausted,” he said.