Playing for high stakes

Is cricket still just a game if it kills those who gave it their lives?

It was difficult to believe that Pakistan's 58-year-old cricket coach Bob Woolmer had died of stress, even though the team had just crashed out of the World Cup having lost to lowly Ireland.

Woolmer, who had, in only the second of his 19 Tests for England as a player, played a remarkable rearguard innings of 149 to revive his team against Australia in 1975, was not new to pressure.

He had coached in England, South Africa and Pakistan and done plenty of work with Canada, Kenya, Namibia, the Netherlands, Scotland and the UAE. Along the way, he introduced cricket to the wonders of the laptop (In the 1996 World Cup, England's Graeme Hick was a standout victim of Woolmer's analysis, which revealed that if Hick could be kept scoreless for a spell, he tended to flick an off-stump ball in the air to midwicket. Brian MacMillan took the catch off Fanie de Villiers).

Few shocks can be greater than the discovery that your captain and comrade-in-arms, who discussed ways to win with you in the evening, plotted to lose with the bookies at night. That is what Hansie Cronje dished out and Woolmer took it.

It must have been stressful to abused and hit by your star bowler. That, according to reports, is what Shoaib Akhtar gave and Woolmer took it.

The only time Umpire's Post saw him up close was when Pakistan played India at Mohali in early 2005. He had a contract with a television channel and avoided speaking at length to the others. But his enthusiasm for and involvement with the game were palpable.

At daybreak on Friday (India time), the sound bytes emanating from the press conference in Kingston were distressing. "The pathologist's report states that

Mr Woolmer's death was due to asphyxiation as a result of manual strangulation," said Karl Angell, the spokesman for the Jamaican police. "The matter is now being treated by the Jamaica police as a case of murder."

This was only to be expected. There was blood, vomit and diarrhoea at unusually high places in the bathroom of his hotel room, where Woolmer was found unconscious.

Secondly, Jamaica's deputy commissioner of police Mark Shields is known as a man of understatement, one who would not light fires for the sake of it.

The instant Shields walked into a press conference soon after Woolmer's death and announced that the police suspected murder, he knew he was jeopardising Kingston's Cricket World Cup. It was a move that would surely sentence match events to the inside pages.

If Shields thought "what the heck", he has an unflinching ally in Umpire's Post. Is cricket still a game "" Woolmer frequently said it was "" if it kills those who gave it their lives?