The police inquiry into Bob Woolmer’s murder is yet to link it to match-fixing, but newspapers in the UK have already dubbed the connection as the motive.
LONDON: The police inquiry into Bob Woolmer’s murder is yet to link it to match-fixing, but newspapers in the UK have already dubbed the connection as the most plausible motive for the Pakistan coach’s mysterious death.
Cricket commentators have linked Pakistan losing to Ireland last week, causing distress to Woolmer and some pages of the former-English all-rounder’s forthcoming autobiography going missing, arguing that he had felt the brunt of the match-fixing mafia who wanted to stop him from making some sensational revelations about the corruption in the game.
The Daily Telegraph claimed Woolmer was upset after a trusted friend told him of suspicious movements in betting markets in Mumbai a month before the Pakistan-Ireland match. His family said they had no idea why the murder had happened and said the Pakistan coach was in no way connected to match-fixing.
However, press reports suggest that after last Saturday’s double-defeat of biggies India and Pakistan at the hands of minnows Bangladesh and Ireland respectively, Woolmer may have changed his mind about naming those involved in taking bribes.
Suspicions of the involvement of the gambling underworld were heightened when the chief investigator of the ICC’s anti-corruption unit, Jeff Rees flew to Jamaica. Lord Paul Condon, former commissioner of Scotland Yard and the man who first revealed the dangers of associating with those involved in match-fixing six year’s ago, is also on stand-by, ready to fly out as and when needed.
Only two weeks ago Lord Condon had told the House of Lords that “illegal betting was now more lucrative in some countries than drug dealing and robbery.”
He was of course referring to the multi-million pound illegal betting industry in India and Pakistan which is under focus again with analysts giving blow by blow accounts of how small and big-time bookies in the sub-continent make money on anything that moves.
Some describe how “from multi-starred hotels of the Gulf to seedy suburban Mumbai dens, cricket gambling is the biggest of big business.”
England captain Michael Vaughan on Friday night alleged that ‘match-fixing is still going on at the highest level of cricket.’ “If I’m honest then, yes I think it does go on,” Vaughan told The Daily Mail.
“I have never experienced it in my team or players that I’ve played against, but my gut feeling is that there is still some kind of corruption in the game,” he clarified.
Former English Captain Nasser Hussain echoed his successor’s comments. Writing in his column from St Lucia, he argues that “once fixers get their claws in, they have you for life,” but of course distancing himself from the phenomenon saying he has never been approached by a bookie, despite a “surname like Hussain and the sub-continent being at the centre of the wrong-doing.”
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