Two all-rounders have been appointed to key positions on the Trinidad & Tobago team for next year’s Carib Beer Series and Stanford Twenty20 Cup.

All-rounder Rayad Emrit will fill the role of captain, and former T&T all-rounder

Kelvin Williams will replace the absent David Williams as national coach for the two competitions.

Emrit has been named captain of the national team and replaces regular captain Daren Ganga, who is on West Indies duty in South Africa.

Williams’ selection as national coach was a surprise as the other two candidates – former Test spinner Raphick Jumadeen and former Test batsman Larry Gomes – had worked with the players recently.

The unbeaten Haitian Joachim Alcine retained his World Boxing Association (WBA) light middleweight title with a 12th round technical knockout victory over Panama's Alfonso Mosquera on Saturday night.

Canada-based Alcine exploded in the late rounds with some impressive shots and finished what had been a competitive bout for the first 10 rounds, at two minutes 17 seconds of round 12.

The victory improved Alcine's record to 30-0 with 19 knockouts, while Mosquera slipped to 19 wins (7 knockouts) against six defeats.

Fighting at the Bell Centre in his adopted hometown of Montreal, the 31-year-old Alcine was making his first title defense of the 154-pound title he won from American Travis Simms in July.

He knocked Mosquera down early in the 12th round with a right-left combination, then had him down again for an eight-count before the bout was stopped when the dazed Mosquera was caught against the ropes.

Alcine, who turned pro as a 147-pound welterweight in 1999, has had a plethora of English-speaking Caribbean victims on his log, including Guyanese Leon Gilkes, Denny Dalton, and Wayne Harris, plus Barbadian Christopher Henry, and St Lucia-born Benjamin Modeste.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC - The man at the helm when Jamaica qualified for the 1998 World Cup Football Finals in France, Rene Simons, is on his way back to the island as the nation's technical director.

The move was widely rumored in recent weeks after the new JFF executive came to office last month and fired national coach Bora Milutinovic.

Simons is expected to begin his assignment on January 5, 2008, and in a letter to his “friends” in Jamaica, he expressed delight at returning.

"Nothing could be more appropriate for the return of this technical staff to Jamaica," Simons stated.

Simons, who successfully guided Brazilian club Coritaba to promotion to Serie A after capturing the Serie B title last month, had said publicly in Brazil in recent weeks that he had decided to take the offer to return to Jamaica in the new year.

The JFF president Captain Horace Burrell held a press conference at the JFF’s New Kingston offices Tuesday afternoon and confirmed media reports that Simons was on his way back to Jamaica with a coaching staff.

“Professor Simons will take along with him from Brazil, three assistants, Glydston Ananias, trainer Alfredo Montesso, and goalkeeper coach Chio Santos,” Burrell stated.

With the Miami Heat struggling this season and seeming to be going nowhere with their current cast of characters, the question now becomes what lies in the future for the ailing ball club?

It’s obvious that the current line up is really having a hard time finding their way and may end up digging themselves a hole too deep to climb out of this season. Although the Heat as a team seems to adopt the persona of their big man Shaquille O’neal and never worry about anything during the regular season, this year is somewhat different, as they have yet to show they will be in contention this time around.

According to the Heat team report, even as the team is in danger of falling 10 or more games below .500 by the end of its current six-game West Coast trip, the attitude is one of calm. "In the game of basketball, you can never get worried," said Dwyane Wade. "If you go into the next game worried or the next day worried, you'll never get out of the funk. You've just got to work your way out of it by playing. Being worried is not going to do anything. You've got to go out there and do it."

But despite the ability they have shown to rebound over their recent years even Udonis Haslem acknowledges that this situation might be different. "It's a different team and different situation, but it's good to reflect back to something like that knowing it's not the end of the road," Haslem said referring to their recent seasons. "We started off slow, but we can still turn it around because we've done it before."

The question now becomes: what is in the future for a team with an ageing and ailing O'Neal making $20 million in salary which isn’t coming off the books any time soon? What will the capped-out Heat who won't have any big free-agent bucks to play with in the summer do to enhance their ball club? It seems barring a miracle, Riley and his team are stuck with each other.

Yes the Heat still has Wade, who has shown he can get it done. But if the team’s personnel don’t improve over time, will Wade opt out of his contract on his first opportunity?