The Trib (59 page)

Before it all, there was an impeccably observed minute's silence for the victims of the London bombings, an event that has had an undeniable effect on the mood of the masses of Lions supporters in Auckland these past few days. However, they still had enough left to get behind their team with the same ferocity and passion as they have since the tour's opening game. In all truth, they've been the only positive contribution from Britain and Ireland to this test series.

Graham Henry praised the supporters' efforts after the game and he even managed to fit in a bit of canvassing for the New Zealand bid for the 2011 World Cup. But the last word of a bizarre tour had to go to Woodward, and the head coach proved that he wasn't all out of crazy just yet. ‘If I was brutally honest I'd bring more players on a tour like this and I'd play more games. When I say more games, I'd try to play on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and I'd try to make the Lions bigger and better.'

And with that the men in the white coats came in to wheel him away. Well, not really but it wouldn't have looked at all out of place.

Best of luck Southampton FC.

The murder of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer, strangled in his hotel room, was a shocking end to a glittering life.

25 March 2007

T
he turbulent city of Kingston is still awash with incredible rumours about the Cricket World Cup murder. The strangling of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer – hours after Ireland had knocked his team out of the competition – has shocked the world and brought the issue of the purity of professional sport into question once more.

On Thursday night, four-and-a-half days after his body was found by a hotel chambermaid, the Jamaican police finally announced that Woolmer had been asphyxiated by manual strangulation.

At a press conference in front of hundreds of reporters, ex-Scotland Yard detective Mark Shields told how a person or persons unknown had gained access to Woolmer's room on the twelfth floor and killed him with such force that a bone was broken in his neck. Woolmer was a big man, 6 ft 1" and over 18 stone. It wouldn't have been easy to kill him. The police are following several lines of inquiry but have yet to detain a suspect.

They believe the coach knew his killer and say that ‘those associated with or having access to Mr Woolmer may have vital information that would assist us with our inquiry'.

Kingston has had an unwanted reputation for many years. From the seventeenth-century buccaneers to modern-day Yardie drug gangs, it is a city where violent death is common. One-hundred-and forty people were murdered in January alone, in a city with a population of 660,000.

The Pegasus in New Kingston is a busy international hotel. The flags of the competing nations fly in the lobby, which has been converted to a cricket theme for the fortnight that the city hosts six World Cup matches. But the prosperous and comfortable facade cannot hide the fact that the violence of the city outside has found its way inside the hotel's doors. Two years ago an American air steward was murdered in his room at the hotel.

After the game last Saturday, Woolmer and his team pulled up in their team bus outside the Pegasus just as a bus taking Irish supporters and media to an out-of-town party drove away. It was 7.30 p.m.

Woolmer went to the bar just off the lobby and had two bottles of the local beer, Red Stripe. At 8.30 p.m. he retired for the evening. It had been a long and stressful day ... the team bus had left for the ground at 7 a.m. that morning for the 9.30 a.m. match against Ireland. It is not known what he did in his room but he logged onto the internet and sent an email to his wife Gill at 3.12 a.m. She said he was fine, albeit upset about the loss to Ireland. The last email he sent was to his ghostwriter Ivo Tennant. It read:

‘We might have to do this from afar. I don't know what is going to happen next. We will first play our game against Zimbabwe and then fly back to Pakistan. This will give me more time to work on my book on coaching.

The articles will have to be more general from now on.

Thanks Bob

PS: What a miserable day it has been.

Almost as bad as Edgbaston, 1999! [In 1999, South Africa lost the World Cup semi-final to Australia off the last ball of the game.]'

Whatever happened in room 374 over the next few hours is now under intense scrutiny by Jamaican police. What is known is there were no signs of forcible entry and nothing was stolen from the room. Woolmer's body was discovered by a chambermaid at 10.45 a.m. He was rushed to hospital and declared dead thirty minutes later.

The Pakistan team's media manager, PJ Mir, told reporters that Woolmer was naked and there was blood, vomit and faeces on his body.

Rooms on the twelfth floor are larger than those in the rest of the hotel and were thus allocated to senior members of each squad and those requiring extra space, such as physiotherapists. Four of the Irish party were billeted there: captain Trent Johnston, coach Adrian Birrell, his assistant Matt Dwyer and physio Iain Knox, although all four were absent that night.

The hotel's security was lax before the killing. I visited batsman Jeremy Bray in his room the night before the Ireland v Pakistan match and was able to do so without any scrutiny.

Since Woolmer's death, there have been uniformed guards stationed at each of the three lifts, who travel upwards with guests, who must show a pass key.

It was a shocking end to a glittering life spent travelling the world playing and coaching the game in a way that brought him great respect and affection. Bob Woolmer was a global figure, a man whose innovative techniques brought him to the top jobs at South Africa and Pakistan – he may have been in line to coach England – and who had homes in all three countries.

Two nights before he died, Bob Woolmer was in good spirits. A big, jolly character with one of those odd accents beaten into shape by a career that took him all round the world – he was born in India and educated in England. He was holding court.

The Belisario Suite of the Pegasus Hotel was the venue for a reception hosted by the Pakistan team for the international media.

Woolmer had not been having an easy ride from the Pakistani media and his team was the most controversial in the game. Two star fast bowlers, Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammed Asif, failed drug tests last year and both dropped out of the World Cup squad on the same day, shortly before the competition. Injury was cited as the reason but no one believed that story.

Their captain, Inzamam ul-Haq, was the man who caused a test match to be abandoned in England last summer when he refused to accept an umpire's ruling that he had cheated by altering the condition of the ball.

When I arrived at the press reception it was winding down but it was still disconcerting to see the room divided into brown and white factions. The Asian pressmen stuck to themselves, lined up along one wall while Woolmer talked to the Irish and UK press at the other.

He sucked on his bottle of beer and was very entertaining in the short time I spoke with him. He gave a passable impression of an Irish accent in imitation of a fellow reporter, so I dared him to do the impression at the post-match conference the following day. He laughed and suggested he might say, ‘I tought tree-tree-tree for tree was a good enough score.' The following day his team got nowhere near 333, being bowled out by Ireland for 132. I was tempted to throw his joke back at him but thought better of it.

He talked about the book he was working on, and the analysis he had done on the great players of the past. Woolmer's work with computers revolutionised cricket coaching over the last decade and he talked about this too.

He also told the Irish reporters how he knew he was out of a job once this competition was over. His contract was up on 30 June but he revealed that he had gone to his office in Lahore shortly before leaving for Jamaica to discover that it had been given to someone else.

That was so typical of cricket in that exciting but exasperating land. It was to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, the patron of the Pakistan cricket board, that the board's chairman Naseem Ashraf announced his resignation last week as the team were eliminated.

The sport of cricket is huge there, far bigger than any other; the route to vast millions for businessmen and enormous influence for politicians. It is also a rare way for the nation to show off on the world sporting stage. Arguably the greatest moment in Pakistan's history since independence was when the team led by Imran Khan beat England in the 1992 World Cup final.

Khan launched a political career shortly afterwards but has been thwarted in his attempts to gain even a modicum of power.

The growing strength of the economies of south Asia, especially India, means the region is now the breadbasket of world cricket. Television rights for this event brought in $2 billion to the ICC, mostly from India. Such riches are in contrast to the modest sums paid to Asian players until relatively recently. Add to that a rapidly increased number of meaningless competitions – to satisfy TV companies – and the temptation for players to play at a level short of their best is clear.

Cricket has been in thrall to Asian gambling syndicates for many years. Millions of dollars change hands every time India or Pakistan play and it doesn't take much to subvert the result. The notorious Cronjegate scandal saw three of the nine captains of the test countries banned for life for taking bribes to fix matches. Players from well-paid sides, too, such as Australia and England, were dragged into the scandal.

And now cricket has a murder on its hands. The fifteen members of the Pakistan squad who spoke movingly about their shock at Woolmer's death at a memorial service on Wednesday night awoke to hour-long police interviews and compulsory fingerprinting on Thursday. It was a final humiliation for a demoralised side.

The Ireland team continued with their preparations for the second phase, upset at the death of a fellow sportsman and bemused at the atmosphere that built up all week. The entire Irish party was away from the hotel on the night of the murder, having travelled to the resort of Ocho Rios where their families and Irish supporters were staying.

Woolmer was a great and generous friend to Ireland, lobbying for extra opportunities for junior members of cricket's family. Ireland coach Adrian Birrell, a South African who knew him well from his days coaching in that country, recalled their last meeting on Saturday night.

‘He was very humble. His last words to me were that “the toss didn't matter. You would have won anyway.”'