COMMANDER of the Guyana Police Force ‘A’ Division Clifton Hicken and former president of the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) Christopher Matthias will go head-to-head for the presidency of the Georgetown Football Association (GFA) at tomorrow’s elections at the Sleep In International Hotel. The election, based on the constitution of the GFA, is done via a slate system with Hicken as president, Aaron Fraser vice-president, Frank ‘English’ Parris vice-president General Secretary Charles Greaves, Althea Scipio as treasurer and assistant secretary/treasurer Lloyd Millington.

Matthias’ slate has Mark Phillips as vice-president, vice-president Akram Sabree, Stephen Joseph General Secretary, Adepemo Peters treasurer, Aduke Woolford in the capacity as assistant secretary and Charmine Wade as assistant secretary treasurer.
While Chronicle Sport was unable to contact Matthias for a comment and to hear his plans for the sport in the city, Hicken, a former player with the GPF Football Club, believes that it’s time a breath of fresh air be given to the sport.
Hicken in an interview with Chronicle Sport said that a number of persons, including several clubs within Georgetown, had asked him to consider running for the position of president of the GFA.
After getting the required permission from his superiors in the GPF, Hicken said that he intends to bring discipline to the sport and work along with other stakeholders to make the GFA the envy of football in Guyana.
Using his position in the Force, Hicken pointed out, “We’ve been doing our social crime intervention programmes and football is one of the things we’ve been developing within the various communities”.
“We’ve gained a lot of success through this intervention and I would like to see it expand to a wider scale and in a more structured way. While I’m seeing that the children in the primary school get a chance to play, I think we should go beyond that and football should be divided into more subsections and wards so we can touch Georgetown in its entirety,” said the ‘A’ Division Commander.
Asked if his presence could see corporate Guyana throwing their support and finances behind the sport, Hicken said, “I think over the years I’ve had a good interaction with the corporate sector and in fact, they are supporting my social crime prevention initiatives. They are currently supporting my Commander U-15 football programme.”
His opposition, Matthias, is popularly known as the man the world governing body FIFA removed from office, stating that he (Matthias) was bringing the game of football in Guyana into disrepute.
It’s almost one year now since the country’s first Normalisation Committee was installed to clean up the sport locally and to reform the GFF’s Constitution which was recently done.
“I’ve been looking at all of the infighting that’s going on in football and I think fresh blood is always needed whenever complacency steps in. So with my experience coming in as Division Commander and as a man with over 26 years service in the GPF, I think yes, I’ll be the best person for the job,” the senior GPF official said.
Hicken was keen to point out, that with him being the president at least, “I could be going into more communities. I’ve been fortifying communities that aren’t on our youth programmes with football gear from the corporate community and, being a part of the GFA now, we would be able to do things in a structured way.
“We haven’t had, for as long as I could remember, any inter-community football at a wide level. We have clubs, yes, but we also need communities involved and also look more into the school system from an association level and not wait for the GFF or an entity outside of football.”