Officials to name new stadium

World Cup officials will announce the replacement for the Brian Lara Stadium, which was dropped from the list of venues last month, on Monday. Work on the 15,000-capacity ground in southern Trinidad won't be finished in time for the World Cup in March.

It was scheduled to host warm-up matches involving Ireland, Pakistan, South Africa and Canada but Don Lockerbie, the venue development director, told PA Sport: "The Brian Lara Stadium is our casualty and obviously we would have liked to go through the whole of the World Cup without any casualties.

"The government of Trinidad & Tobago took a risk that they were willing to take and we were willing to take with them. After Brian Lara scored his 400 runs against England in 2004 they decided to build a cricket stadium in his honour.

"We stood by it as long as we could, but we made the decision that we didn't feel it would be right for the Brian Lara Stadium to be a host.

"It wasn't a matter of not having some kind of a stadium there, in fact the pitch and field are ready to go and we could certainly put the grandstands around it. We just felt it would be too much of a construction zone because of the other things being built there.

"We will name the site we are moving to on Monday. The government of Trinidad and Tobago will still play its warm-up matches in a sizeable stadium that will be customised just for the World Cup. People will be getting a world-class state-of-the-art venue, even in its temporary mode."

For the first time teams will prepare for the World Cup with matches against the other international sides, with a number of enticing games such as England-Australia and South Africa-Pakistan on the schedule.

"The 2007 World Cup will mark the first time where teams will actually play each other in the warm-up stage," Lockerbie added. "When the ICC changed that to have England playing Australia for example in a warm-up match, we looked at these as serious games because no team will want to go into these and lose their momentum."