Waterhouse FC General Manager Kerry-Ann Robinson says her club was not at fault for failing to meet the Internet requirement for staging the recent Scotiabank Concacaf League (SCL) game at Stadium East.

The Jamaican club, which lost 1-3 to Haiti’s Arcahaie FC on November 5, was eliminated from the tournament, and was spared salt in the wounds when regional football body Concacaf issued only a warning for the Internet flop.

“It wasn’t actually a fault of ours. The telecom service provider had an issue at the venue which was very unfortunate because… inspection was done and installation was done days prior. But on the [match] day there were issues that [the service provider] just couldn’t resolve quickly enough,” she told the Jamaica Observer on Friday.

“Concacaf was basically just being formal in notifying us that ‘you were actually in breach, but we understand the situation’, and as such it was just a warning,” Robinson explained.

She said measures will be put in place to mitigate a recurrence which could incur a fine of up to US$4,000.

“The club has a modem that we always travel with and we had to use it to provide Internet for the conference section. But we only had one and it [the Wi-Fi connection] couldn’t reach to the section where the Concacaf office was.

“Looking back, it was a good thing we had the portable modem. So going forward we may probably need to have one or two others [as back-up],” the Waterhouse general manager said.

Because of risks associated with the novel coronavirus, Waterhouse had to satisfy strict requirements laid out by both Concacaf and Jamaica’s health authorities in order to host the round of 16 tie.

“Happily, we were able to execute, and all persons tested in the staging of the game — about 100 of them — were negative, and that was a major success for us,” Robinson told the Observer.

She added: “It was one of my hardest preparations for a game… just to get approval, the planning and the execution of the game. I’m grateful we were able to have the game — the result was unfortunate, of course, but it was a learning curve for us.”

— Sanjay Myers