The Nick Townsend Column: Did Woolmer pay the price for knowing a sinister truth?

Too often, sportsmen delve into the dictionary of easy metaphors to describe a defeat. Never again, it is to be hoped, will there be idle talk of tragedy following nothing more consequential than the loss of points to a rival. But then none of us imagined we would ever have to associate sport and murder in a literal sense. It is not easy to do so now.

At the beginning of the week, the focus of this column would have been Andrew Flintoff's pedaloing or Michael Vaughan's inadvertent piece of potholing, but these were put into context by the death from what appeared to be natural causes of the Pakistan coach, Bob Woolmer. The subsequent revelation of the heinous act perpetrated in Room 374 of the Pegasus Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, on Sunday and the conspiracy theories that have since crystalised have propelled top-class cricket into so dark a place that the whole game is gripped by the shame of association. The England captain's admission on Friday that he has "a gut feeling" corruption remains within cricket will do nothing to vanquish those concerns.

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From a World Cup of tantalising possibilities, it has become a Cup of Woe. Rather like the feeling of emptiness and despair which overcame us when the 1985 European Cup final proceeded while the bodies were still being removed at the Heysel Stadium, does anyone really care about the cricket? Geoff Boycott spoke for many with his instinctive response when the presenter broached India's departure from the tournament on Radio 5 Live on Friday night: "I'm not interested in India; I'm thinking about Bob." Will anything about this tournament be remembered beyond the gruesome images evoked by last Sunday's events?

The ICC, inevitably, have decreed that the show continues, and, given that this is a tournament in which there has been so vast an emotional and financial investment within the Carib-bean, with enormous implications if they had prematurely put up the "end of run" signs, they are right to do so. Right for the Caribbean, and right in the sense that sport, for all the political and other forces fighting over its riches and the power it confers, should still strive to be a haven from the travails of real life. That is a view with which Vaughan concurred, though his declaration ahead of England's final group game against Kenya yesterday that, despite the violent death of Woolmer, "this great game has to be seen in a great light" was a curiously inappropriate one. At best, the remainder of the tournament can only attempt to light faint beacons of hope within a vast cavern of murky reality.

It would have been different if Woolmer's death had been, as everyone initially assumed, the result of the overstressed heart of a once splendid cricketer turned even grander coach giving out under the strain of overseeing Pakistan's ignominious World Cup exit. But when the local police chief suggested that the circumstances were "suspicious", it made Hercule Poirots of us all. Even the most cursory piece of detection offers only two possibilities. It could have been the act of a disgruntled supporter following defeat by Ireland. In today's climate, that could not be entirely rejected. Sporting fanaticism - a kind of oxymoron, that - comes in many forms.

It is ugly enough when it erupts in the form of Pakistan supporters back home burning effigies of Woolmer and the captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, while chanting "Death to Bob Woolmer. Death to Inzamam". But murder? Well, those protestors half-got their wish.

But the other, far more likely, scenario appears to be a connection with match-fixing, recent or past. There is one obvious connection in that Woolmer was South Africa's coach at the time when their former captain, the late Hansie Cronje, was revealed to have accepted gifts for influencing Test matches and one-day internationals. Woolmer was never implicated in that, and one theory is that he intended to make some uncomfortable revelations about the subject. That asks us to contemplate forces within and on the periph-ery of the game so sinister it scarcely bears contemplation. One can only imagine what it means for those participating in the World Cup. This, as Vaughan observed, "is something I don't think any player has had to deal with in the history of the game. This is new territory".

Unlike Flintoff's boozing 'n' boating escapade. That laddish-ness has induced from the deposed vice-captain quite enough remorse for one week, possibly enough for a lifetime, and is pretty ancient territory. It is a mirror of English society, its farcical detail feasted upon avariciously by the red-tops, who relish nothing better than a fallen hero while the rest of the world ridicules Beered-Up Britain.

But all that has been rendered an irrelevance. It is Pakistan that has come under scrutiny now. There, cricket is a microcosm of a nation riven with corruption and factionalism, an order which only Imran Khan was able to break. That is why many will contend that though Woolmer was an Indian-born Englishman, it was no coincidence that his death occurred while he was the coach of this particular adopted nation, whose cricketers' pride and self-will creates a propensity for self-destruction.

Other nations have been afflicted by cricket scandals, including England. Pakistan, though, is regarded as a serial offender, by fact and by innuendo: from the defeat by Bangla-desh in the 1999 World Cup and the suspicion that the match had been thrown, which led to the ICC anti-corruption unit scrutinising Tests and one-dayers since 2001; to the doping bans of Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif, later controversially overturned by the Pakistan Cricket Board; and the forfeited Oval Test, the Darrell Hair affair and the considerable fallout from that.

Claims that a gambling cartel is somehow at the centre of Woolmer's death will abound until proved otherwise. Top-class cricket today is inextricably linked to betting. Few international team sports offer a greater capacity for cheating without undue risk of detection.

Already, the former Pakistan pace bowler Sarfraz Nawaz has raised the spectre of a "match-fixing mafia" silencing Woolmer. If the coach's demise is associated, directly or indirectly, with gambling on games, the assump-tion is that it can be traced back to the Indian subcontinent, where illegal bookmaking is rife. Mark Davies, spokesman for Betfair, Britain's largest betting exchange, claims such "bookmakers" benefit from as substantial a market as legal betting does here. Ruthlessness is endemic in such a gambling environment.

Many here, those who don their off-whites on an idyllic village green, or those spectators who flock to county festivals, will find it difficult to accept that this is part of the same sport that they cherish. This was not what Harold Pinter had in mind when he talked of cricket as "the greatest thing God ever created". But Woolmer's murder, following other outrages, permeates, and in a way poisons, the perception of the entire game.

But the show must go on, albeit with a unified heavy heart, though the anti-corruption unit will be working overtime from now on after a week when the calypso rhythms have turned from ones of joyous expectancy to ones of deepest foreboding.