Bob Woolmer: one of the good guys

March 19, 2007 by The Third Umpire

It was very shocking and sad to hear the news about Bob Woolmer at the weekend: he'd been a contributor to and supporter of our magazine SPIN ever since the first issue, always ready to write columns or be interviewed. The only time I met him was the day after the Pakistan walk-off at the Oval last August: despite being under obvious pressure, he invited me to have dinner with him at his hotel and spoke very freely and openly about the situation, telling me plenty of things that possibly he shouldn't have.

Bob Woolmer was like that: you might email him suggesting he write a column and within an hour he would reply: not just agreeing to write the column, but with the column itself attached. He was a man who couldn't talk enough about cricket, his enthusiasm for it, his ideas about the game.

On his website Bobwoolmer.com, he would blog and answer queries from players and fans - even possibly insane fans suggesting the wholesale sacking of the team would get a civilised reply.

How many other top sports coaches or managers would do that?

Alongside all the other pressures he obviously faced as coach of Pakistan was the fact that he was pretty much their sole media outlet: Woolmer was always ready to talk for free. Compare his attitude to his own players who would only talk to journalists in return for a giant fee (upwards of £500 a time); or to other international coaches from whom the words have to wrenched like blood from a stone. Where so many players and coaches regard the media (and by extension the fans who pay their wages) with suspicion or even contempt, Woolmer just loved to talk about cricket, to keep the debate going.

Quite why there are so few with that enthusiasm at the top level of sport is something of a mystery.

Woolmer knew from the start that the Pakistan job would be tough: standards of preparation and organisation in the game in Pakistan were behind those in Australia or England; while the revolving-door selection policies of previous coaches could be fixed, the injury-prone nature of his star players could not. He rarely had all his best players available.

And from last August, the run-of-the-mill problems of being Pakistan coach stepped up a gear: Inzy leading the walk-off at the Oval; Akhtar and Asif failing the drugs tests; with Inzy banned, Younis Khan took the captaincy then resigned it a day later; the chairman of the PCB resigning; Akhtar allegedly slapping Woolmer during an altercation; Afridi banned for going after a spectator in South Africa; Akhtar and Asif crying off at the last minute from the World Cup, with drugs rumours still flying about; the surrender to Ireland on Saturday. Incredible events individually but taken as a whole almost unbelievable; the image of Woolmer being the well-meaning teacher charged with a class of naughty boys with no respect for a) authority or b) their own massive talent is hard to avoid.

And those were just the widely reported events. When I met Woolmer after the Oval fiasco, he was clearly not happy - if philosophical - about many other aspects of the Pakistan set-up from the top down, including his relationships with Inzamam and the tour manager Zaheer Abbas. He implied that he found it hard to get through to the younger players and that the presence of so many families on tour had inhibited his chances of running the team as he would have wanted. Re: Inzamam, he implied a breakdown of the relationship between captain and coach: "It's impossible for me," he said. "If I do something he doesn't like he won't talk to me for two days. And therein lies your reason for what happened at the Oval. I’ll communicate anytime but you can’t communicate with a brick wall."

Woolmer enjoyed the team's religious fervour – it gave them a common purpose and in some ways made them more disciplined and easier to coach, he reckoned - but it also left him as more of an outsider than a coach normally is. In many ways, it seemed like a lonely life, going round the world with this problematic bunch, while his wife stayed back in South Africa.

I've put up the interview I did with him for SPIN ahead of Pakistan's tour of England last summer: Woolmer had plenty to say about the nature of the Pakistan cricket culture - and his plans for improving the team. Read the interview here [http://www.stickcricket.com/feature310.html]. Bob Woolmer's enthusiasm and passion for the game and for life in general is obvious throughout: what a great interviewee he was - and what a great man.

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