FORMER Super Cricket League champions St Catherine Saints have had their appeal to postpone this weekend’s game versus St Elizabeth Warriors turned down by the Jamaica Cricket Association (JCA).

President of the club Osmand Dann says they decided to make a formal request after being aware that several of their senior players, including captain Tamar Lambert, had been drafted into a 13-man Jamaica team to participate in a cricket festival in the United States.

The other players selected are batsmen Danza Hyatt and Dean Morgan, along with spinners Bevon Brown and Gavin Wallace. The St Catherine team had already been without top legspinner Odean Brown, who is away on West Indies ‘A’ team duties.

“We made a decision last weekend that we would request from the JCA a postponement. We sent in a written request to the Competitions and Complaints Committee. We gave them a reason that we would be short of most of our quality players,” Dann said.

“This request, I understand, was passed on to the Board of Directors of the JCA. They met and totally rejected it and so we are now asked to find a 13-man squad to play against St Elizabeth on Saturday,” he added.

The club had also feared that two of their young batsmen, Oraine Williams and Kemar Foster, would also have been out due to a national under-19 training camp. However, checks with the JCA revealed the camp is unlikely to commence this weekend as was originally planned.

Secretary of the JCA Ian Brown told the Observer that based on the rules that govern the competition, the postponement could not be allowed.

“They have some players away, but based on our fixtures and based on our rules, we can’t postpone a game for that. For a game to be postponed it would have to be a situation where a venue is deemed as dangerous and there is no other ground that is available that is certified as being adequate,” he said.

“The club has a Junior Cup team plus several under-19 players. This is an opportunity for them to blood some players. What if next week we have a next game and five more players are gone again? This thing would never end,” he added.

Meanwhile, Dann told the Observer that finding good enough players to fill the void left by the senior players would not be easy.

“This is supposed to be the premiere cricket competition in the island and it should have the highest standard… If you’re now telling me to go into the schools to try and get inexperienced players to play, then you are reducing the quality of the competition,” he said.

Despite the circumstances, the president insists they are using all the resources available to field a competitive team at the weekend.

“We’re trying to put something together, but we’ve still not found a complete squad. The latest count I have is about eight or nine players.

“To find some of the Junior Cup players to fill in will not be easy because they weren’t playing the Super League and have not been to training because some of them have their jobs,” he said.

When asked whether anything in the competition rules and guidelines alludes to the situation that the Saints find themselves in, Brown said while it does not, the JCA is always willing to consider each request closely.

“We don’t have rules like that in writing. We’re not averse to looking at it because if a team was to have seven or eight of their first-team players missing then it is something to look at.

“But we don’t have it written down in our rules where a number of players being unavailable would (automatically) force a postponement like in football (Digicel Premier League),” he said.