A murder that defies belief

I know that many people, particularly my friends in the United States, cannot understand my love of cricket, that so very British Empire game with its history of men in white flannels, the slow languid pace of the game and the weird apparently incomprehensible rules. But I think even they understood it to be a game of gentlemen, played by gentlemen, the very epitome of all that is good about sport.

But all that has been changing for quite a few years. The old county game watched by the proverbial one man and his dog, the clubs supported by local raffles and lotteries, and the players wives making the cream teas has long gone. Some one decided there was money to be made in cricket and a whole new marketing drive was created to sell the game to the masses. First one day cricket came in with a limited length of innings for each team, loud coloured clothing and a definite result at the end of the day. Out of this was spawned competitive leagues and eventually the World Cup, currently being played in the West Indies.

Money began to circulate in the game - an awful lot of money. Lots of people got very rich..and some people got rich illegally. Maybe the first high profile casualty of greed and corruption was the South African cricket captain Hansie Cronje. A man of God, known for his strict Dutch Reform Church beliefs, and a man who has coached youngsters throughout the world, Cronje was found guilty in 2000 of organising match fixing with bookmakers and making a lot of money from crooked results. He was banned from cricket for life.



In 2002, a light plane on which Cronje was travelling crashed in the mountains near South Africa's western cape and Cronje and the two pilots were killed. There were voices then who said that the plane had been tampered with and Cronje killed by a betting syndicate to shut him up, but few believed them.

Since then other players from various countries have been found guilty in betting and match fixing scandals and a sense of discomfort has grown that something is far from right in the cricketing world but that a lid has been shut on how bad the situation is.

Then the World Cup began this month in the West Indies and, after an extraordinary defeat for Pakistan, the 4th ranked team in the world, against Ireland, a team of part-timers, the Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer, was found murdered by strangulation in his hotel room. So far the guilty party has not been caught but it is hard to believe, particularly after the Pakistan defeat, that his murder is not related in some way to more disreputable goings on involving some kind of betting scandal. No one has been charged and I am not suggesting any particular party is to blame.

I have met Bob Woolmer when he was coach of my county team, Warwickshire, back in the mid nineties and the fact that his life could end in this way is almost beyond belief.




What is now clear for all to see is that the game of cricket, though a game for the cognoscenti with its strange traditions, was always a game played in the very finest spirit of sportsmanship. Apart from the tragedy of Woolmer's murder, the tragedy for the game of cricket is the now clear loss of that image. It is in fact a game that currently smells alarmingly of something very unpleasant indeed!