Bermuda Football Association to bring forward the start of the football season are adopted.

A rough draft by the BFA competitions committee, presented at Monday's meeting with the affiliates, calls for the new season to begin on September 1 with the Charity Cup.

Five days later, on September 6, the first of the Martonmere Cup matches will be played at PHC Stadium...breaking away from the traditional Tuesday night matches for this popular competition.

Other dates proposed for Martonmere Cup are September 10, September 15 and September 20-21 for the two semi-final matches.

The league programme for football is being suggested to start on September 29, by which time the cricket season will have ended.

The final month of the cricket season involves the Champion of Champions semi-finals and final on September 1 and 2, the Knockout Cup final on September 8 and the tour of the Leeward Islands team.

All of the football matches will be at night so fans of both sports can still watch cricket during the day and football at night.

Over the years both the BFA and Bermuda Cricket Board of Control have worked together in a bid to avoid overlapping the two sports as much as possible.

Giving greater flexibility over rescheduling is one of the reasons behind the plan to start the football season earlier.

"What the competitions committee was looking at was a way to ease the pressure on the facilities, the managers, players on the teams and the volunteers by starting the season a bit earlier,'' explained BFA general secretary David Sabir yesterday.

"You know the season always starts with the Charity Cup and the Martonmere Cup competitions. So this year we propose to start the season on September 1 with the latter part of the season available for any backlog.'' One of the things the restructuring committee, under chairman Calvin Smith, was expected to look at was the number of competitions within local soccer. It has been suggested that one of them, possibly the Friendship and Shield, which run together, would be scrapped so as to ease the number of games in midweek.

"What we are saying is this is an attempt to alleviate some of the stress and at the end of the day if it proves to be a worthwhile proposal then we will move with it,'' Sabir said.

"Of course this was only a proposal so it needed some examination by affiliates and last night we attempted to put it on the table for review for minor discussions and hopefully at the AGM next week we will be clearly in the way that we want to go with it.'' With football and cricket sharing the same fields, starting the new season early could place extra demands on club grounds.

However, by that time the league campaign in cricket will have ended. Also there are many players who play both sports.

"One of the things that became very concerning to some affiliates was the availability of players,'' Sabir acknowledged.

"This is where we are going to have some tinkling in this regard. We don't see a problem in the availability of field because we know that there will be some fields that will no longer be involved with cricket.

"We are hoping that there will be a match somewhere along the line between player availability and venue availability. If not, we might find ourselves in a situation one day, later, where we cannot or will not be able to complete certain aspects of our domestic competition.'' Cricket officials themselves will be seeking a venue in February so as to accomodate the India Test team for two matches on their way to the West Indies.