Death Of A Cricket Icon: Woolmer's Legacy

Bob Woolmer was a wise-cracking, charming, encyclopaedic, generous, opinionated guy who loved the heck out of a game that invokes as much passion in its world as it does disinterest and incomprehension in the New One. He was an India-born English international who maximized his abilities to world-class levels before his career was cut short by injuries and some poor political choices.

As a player he personified that sporting maxim; its not the most talented who win, it's the one who wants it the most. But he chose to play in apartheid South Africa when it was considered death to anyone's international career. Ironically, he went out to coach colored kids in parts of Cape Town that cricket had historically ignored. He went back to England to coach one of the most successful county championship campaigns ever at Warwickshire. Recognized as one of the cleverest tacticians in the game at that point (in baseball terms he was a Bobby Cox, in hockey a Scotty Bowman) he then took a moderately talented post-apartheid South African side from pariah status to within one ball of the World Cup in England in 1999.

For the next four years he coached the so called minnow nations from Bangladesh to Canada and South Africa, and , at the time of his death, he was finishing a 3-year stint as coach of Pakistan. Being the coach of Pakistan is probably the most stressful job in international cricket. You've got a fanaticism only matched by Chelsea supporters on a bad Saturday night, a military and political establishment that is almost prepared to put you away for life unless you win every game, a mixture of prima donna mercenaries and Islamic fundamentalists representing a nation caught in the crossfire of the War on terror.