St. John’s Antigua- After a two-year absence, the three-day tournament will likely return to the Leeward Islands Cricket Association’s (LICA) calendar this year.

No tournament was held in 2010 due to rain and last year’s event was relegated to a two-day warm-up fiasco.

But the president of LICA, Gregory Shillingford, said there is a proposal for this year’s three-day tournament to be played in St Kitts from June 1 to 19 with five teams participating.

“We have a proposal for June 1st to 19th for the LICA Three-Day Tournament. We have five teams that have confirmed participation. They are Montserrat, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla,” Shillingford said.

“Those not participating will be US Virgin Islands, BVI and St Maarten. The three-day tournament is proposed for St Kitts because the teams do not have that capacity to be doing all that travelling.”

Shillingford said a series of challenges – ranging from lack of a venue and unavailability of players to lack of finances – have led to the British Virgin Islands (BVI), United States Virgin Islands (USVI) and St Maarten opting out of this year’s three-day tournament.

“The BVI are still in the process of establishing a ground where they will be able to do their preparations and have their own competition. That has been elusive for them and the usual co-operation they would have had with the USVI to go across and play and practice has proven to be expensive now in the circumstances of reduced economic activity in the entire region,” Shillingford said.

“In the case of the USVI, they have their traditional issue of their players working in the tourist industry having difficulty getting time-off; plus one of their main limiting factors is a lack of finance.

“In the case of St Maarten, it is the availability of players to be able to get time-off to play and at a lesser level finance. Those are the reasons for these teams not being able to play.”

Antigua & Barbuda are the reigning LICA three-day and Nagico one-day champions.