Was the Pakistan coach’s tragic end a by-product of match-fixing, asks stephen fay |
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The speculation that fills the news vacuum caused by the death of Bob Woolmer has grown wilder with the shocking announcement by Jamaican police that he was murdered - by 'manual strangulation' - on the night after his Pakistan World Cup team had been beaten by a team of make-weights.
What could the motive have been? Pakistanis take their cricket seriously and mobs routinely issue death threats after a cricketing catastrophe. But that has always been bombast.
It is barely conceivable that an enraged Pakistani fan got into Woolmer's 12th floor hotel room in Kingston, Jamaica and delivered the coup de grace, and indeed the evidence points to his having opened the door to someone he knew.
The theory most likely to flourish is that Woolmer's death was a by-product of match-
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fixing. After all, Pakistan's loss by three wickets to Ireland is just the kind of result that would have led the ICC to investigate possible misdemeanours.
And the Pakistanis do have form: in the 1999 World Cup, their defeat by Bangladesh in a qualifying match was widely believed to have been fixed. A judicial inquiry in Pakistan by Justice Qayyum reached the damaging conclusion that some fine players from that tournament - Wasim Akram, Mushtaq Ahmed, and Inzamam-ul-Haq who captained Pakistan against Ireland - were guilty of 'partial amnesia' and withholding evidence.
Woolmer, when he coached South Africa, was present when the whole team discussed and rejected a bookie's bribe to fix a match while touring India in 1996. Four years later, Woolmer constantly insisted on the innocence of Hansie Cronje, the SA captain, even after Cronje had confessed to match-fixing.
But Woolmer always convinced me he loved cricket too much to compromise the game. The news from Kingston suggests that I and his many admirers might be wrong. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 22, 2007
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