TWO events in less than a week, unrelated but both utterly unexpected, have effectively dashed hopes that we would be able to look back at our first World Cup and deservedly call it “the best ever”, as the organisers had confidently expected.
The death of the universally admired Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer, and the chilling circumstances of it, has spawned a cricketing hurricane across the Caribbean and well beyond.
The tournament has continued, as it should, but the headlines in the global media have been focused not so much on the cricket but on the rarity of the murder of a high profile official at one of international sport’s premier events.
The initial shock will gradually fade, as it always does, but it can never be forgotten. Woolmer’s bewildering demise will always be associated with Cricket World Cup 2007.
Such off field turmoil has been followed by the first round elimination of Woolmer’s team, the stress and disappointment of which was first thought to have triggered his death, all but certainly to be followed by that of India, commercially the most important entity in the contemporary game.
The exit of the two sub-continental giants has, in one fell swoop, erased a disgruntled television viewership of several million. It is a huge blow, in profit and prestige, to channels that have paid serious money for the rights to broadcast the matches. Sony tv’s panel of experts, housed in London at great expense and commenting from their studio there, now seem redundant.
More to the point, it has devalued the investment of the main sponsors, Hero Honda (motorcycles), Hutch (mobile phone), LG (appliances) and Pepsi (soft drinks), all of whom are large Indian companies or have major share of the gigantic India market.
The departure of Rahul Dravid’s men – more especially, the semi-god Sachin Tendulkar – has also reduced the influx of supporters from the Super Eight stage onwards by several thousand. Already there have been cancellations from India to Barbados, venue for the Super Eight and the final. Had India gone through, their zealous fans, from home and the diaspora, all flushed with wealth from their North American jobs or from the mother country’s booming economy, would have poured in.
The plumb match in the Super Eight was India against Pakistan at Kensington Oval on April 13. That is now replaced by Bangladesh against Ireland, with all due respects to both teams hardly an adequate replacement for cricket’s fiercest rivalry.
Perhaps India, and Pakistan too, will overcome these stunning setbacks soon. Their players can expect a hostile welcome whenever they decide to risk returning home.
Woolmer’s case belongs in an entirely different category. Here was a prominent official of a team surrounded by security even heads of state don’t receive yet, according to police, choked to death by an assailant in his room in one of Kingston’s finest hotels.
The logical assumption that he knew his killer has, at least, reduced the likelihood that Jamaicans were involved. But officials of the vital tourism industry are concerned that the island’s name has again been negatively prominent in reports across the world’s media.
While the International Cricket Council (ICC) grapples with speculation that Woolmer was killed because of revelations he was to make over the old, troubling issue of match-fixing in a book he was writing, and with the immediate effect of his murder on the tournament, there have been contrasting reactions in Jamaica. To be sure, the people are deeply saddened, as they are everywhere. Only a few minutes among the spectators at Sabina Park, in the queue at the Tastees pattie shop or around the Courtleigh Hotel bar confirms that.
Cricket, after all, is an integral part of their life, as it is throughout the former British colonies of the Caribbean, and Woolmer’s reputation as player and, more especially coach, was well known.
But they were astonished at suggestions from elsewhere that the Cup should be abandoned as a result of the turn of events, as distressful as they have been.
Repeated references were made on radio call-in programmes to the continuation of the 1972 Munich Olympics following the massacre of 11 Isreali athletes. The theme was, the show must go on.
Significantly, the West Indies’ last group match, against Ireland at Sabina Park on Friday, drew 15,000, the largest crowd of the tournament to date.
They celebrated the home team’s victory with typical Caribbean gusto and the couple thousand Irish among them were certainly not outdone, even though one of their own, the former head of their cricket board, Bob Kerr, had died of a heart attack earlier in the week at his hotel on the north coach resort of Ocho Rios. Neither group would consider it disrespectful to the memories of either Woolmer or Kerr. Quite the opposite. The attitude of West Indians as the Cup moves south to other territories for the Super Eight is certain to be the same.
What embarrassed Jamaicans as much as anything is that it took as long as five days, and needed outside help, to confirm that Woolmer had been strangled.
“While the world watched and waited, we appeared to be a little Third World country which could not even carry out an autopsy without overseas assistance,” the Daily Observer editorialized. “But then, maybe that’s what we are.”
But the West Indies are no “little Third World country” in cricket, even during the time of their present decline. They can assert themselves again as first among the First World by winning the Cup for the first time since 1979.
They have started promisingly. It is a scenario that would certainly help diminish the sadness and despair of Woolmer’s death and make the World Cup 2007 wortwhile, if not the best ever.