CATEGORY:SPORTS(CRICKET)
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By Trevor Thwaites
Inside Grenada correspondent
Sunday December 03,2006

GRENADA HOSTS the 2006 Windward Islands Cricket Championships starting this weekend with all four islands in competition. The event started on Friday December 1 with Grenada playing St Lucia at Progress Park in St Andrew and St Vincent and the Grenadines and Dominica doing battle at the La Sagesse Playing in St David.

Matches will be played over three days. The second round starts Tuesday December 5, with the winners meeting for championship honours and the losers battling for the third place play-off. The teams will then take a break before starting the one-day competition. The opening game will see the winner of the three-day competition meeting the team finishing last, while the other fixture features a clash between the second and third place finishers.

Those matches are carded for Saturday December 9. The winners meet in the finals on Monday Tuesday 11. Grenada are defending both titles, something that they have done successfully over the last two years. Officials of both the Local Organizing Committee for the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 and the Grenada Cricket Association are viewing the matches with keen interest during the competition.

Both Progress Park and Lasagesse are being prepared as practice venues for the upcoming World Cup and they will be eager to discover the level of preparations that has been achieved to date at both venues. Grenada will host six matches in the second round of the World Cup from April 10-20, 2007. The pitches at the practice venues and those at the national stadium were given a good rating by the World Cup Inspection Team , which recently visited the country.