Should we play on? No

The World Cup of cricket should be abandoned. Its proprietors, the International Cricket Council, have a property more deeply compromised than any major sports event since the Munich Olympics were allowed to carry on despite the slaughter of Israeli athletes and coaches by the terrorists of Black September.

But, like those Olympics, the World Cup will stagger on. However, it is not right. It is about money, convenience, face, and, more money. It is wrong because the conclusion of the Jamaican police that Pakistan's coach, Bob Woolmer, was murdered in his hotel room takes us into far more than the dismayingly light security surrounding a coach who was in charge of a team already locked into circumstances provoking deep suspicion, even by the standards of a game racked by match-rigging scandals in recent years.

It is wrong because the extent of the tragedy for the Woolmer family touches into every corner of the current World Cup; it questions the whole basis of the tournament which lost one of its favourites in the first days of competition through performances so poor they taxed even the belief of a game which will always have the capacity to produce extraordinary results.

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The decision to march on with a competition that can never be less than hollow in the shadow of Woolmer's death - and the inevitable speculation that his killer or killers were acting on behalf of interests that have already done so much to damage the credibility of the game - was no doubt inevitable, given precedents going back to Munich and then the decision to play on in the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus despite the heavy loss of life among the Italian fans.

It is the recurring theme in big-time sport. The show must go on whatever the price to values beyond the field of play and the accountancy of profit.

Those who insist that the World Cup should go on, and yesterday they were joined by members of the Woolmer family, are asking the rhetorical question: what would be served by ending the tournament now? The answer here is that it would declare that cricket, after years of the most appalling compromise, had finally reached a point where it accepted that the very roots of the game were imperilled. The great West Indian writer C L R James asked a question which suddenly becomes as relevant today as when he coined it: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?"

They know of the vagaries of spin and flight and the techniques of batsmanship, but do they know when a moral crisis of appalling dimensions is beating around their heads? They didn't four years ago when they insisted that England travel to Harare and prop up the disgusting, life-draining regime of Robert Mugabe. That was in the name of the World Cup that today talks so blithely of honouring the memory of a man who was, while amid the great controversy of this or any other of its preceding tournaments, walked in upon and, we are told, put to death.

People die, of course, and in all walks life goes on. But it is official now that this wasn't a random death but a murder and you would have to have been hiding away on another planet not, the moment you heard the news, to have guessed the inevitable tide of fear and allegation.

England's captain, Michael Vaughan, applauds the decision to go on, saying the game must be shown in "the great light it is". Great light? Gathering darkness might be a more accurate assessment.

This is, after all, a time when Pakistan were able to refuse to continue a Test match with barely a touch on their knuckles. When an awkwardly obdurate umpire was professionally ruined at the bidding of the same cricket nation who, after surviving the Oval strike without significant punishment, attempted to play fast bowlers who had test positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

This, some will say, is not a game ambushed by some freakishly imposed sadness. It is one that has surrendered so much morality, sporting and otherwise, that it can scarcely complain of innocent victimhood.

Malcolm Speed, the chief executive of the ICC, said that too much would be lost if the World Cup were to be abandoned, adding: "A murder has been committed and we cannot be a captive to that."

Veterans of Munich will recall that the billionaire president of the IOC Avery Brundage made a similar speech when he announced that the Olympics would go on despite the murderous spree of Black September. He said that the Games had to continue because the Israeli lives could not be reclaimed and that the Olympics had their own justification, their own momentum. To celebrate this apparently irrefutable, truth they sent up pretty balloons from the Olympic stadium at the closing ceremony.

The World Cup of cricket would do better to fold its tent without a hint of celebration. Any inclination in that direction surely died along with Bob Woolmer, if not before.