Georgetown: World Cup organisers warned of potential chaos at Super Eight matches here next week because the Providence Stadium is still not ready despite years of planning.

The Local Organising Committee and World Cup chiefs are already at loggerheads over the 25-million-dollar venue.

On Friday, World Cup organisers relieved the Local Organising Committee of control of the ground, with a British company taking charge in an effort to salvage the project ahead of next Wednesday’s match between South Africa and Sri Lanka.

Amongst the myriad of problems at the venue, which is the only one on the South American mainland, are failures to provide security and crowd control turnstiles, poor accreditation facilities and video boards.

Power shortages are also expected to blight the Indian-built venue.

Local media have also reported that Queen’s Park Oval in Trinidad, which hosted the first round matches, and Jamaica’s Trelawny Stadium, where warm-up matches were played, are on stand-by to stage the six matches originally planned for Georgetown.

“We are objecting to them invoking the host venue agreement because we think it was unwarranted and while I cannot prevent them, we are co-operating with them fully,” chief executive of Guyana’s Local Organising Committee, Karran Singh, said.

In a strongly worded e-mail to Singh, and Guyana sports minister Frank Anthony, the World Cup’s senior legal counsel Derek Jones said the decision to take over responsibility for completing remaining aspects of the venue followed concerns that were raised during several weeks about their “failure to proceed satisfactorily or effectively” in relation to the host venue agreement (HVA).

“Your failure to deal adequately with these and other areas has resulted in Cricket World Cup 2007 being unable to have confidence in your ability to deliver a fully functional operating Super Eight venue in accordance with your contractual obligations.”

Singh assured World Cup organisers that they were working to ensure that the matches go ahead as per schedule.

“We have done what we believe in our opinion is the best we can do to host the World Cup... We will have the World Cup matches here in a few days,” Singh said.

But Jones said the World Cup organisers had “lost confidence in the ability of the Local Organising Committee to provide proper site management for the project up to and through the tournament period”.