How Woolmer Took on the Impossible Job

Richard Pybus, a South African, had this to say in the immediate aftermath of Bob Woolmer's death, when the straightforward assumption had been that this genial avuncular man had reached breaking point and suffered a heart attack.

"Coaching Pakistan," he said, "is the toughest job in cricket today. It is a very turbulent society and a very political environment to work in. Pakistan cricket seems to lurch from one drama to another, and as a coach it takes a cumulative effect. All the stuff with that team wears you down. They have an amazing capacity to ambush themselves and you never get into a space where it's simply plain sailing for a coach. You are always sitting there waiting for someone to lob a hand grenade in. You can never plan because you don't even know what is happening tomorrow."

Pybus should know. In 1999, as Pakistan's World Cup assistant coach, he sat on the balcony at Northamptonshire's ground and watched grim-faced as his team contrived to lose, in what have now been shown to be suspicious circumstances, to Bangladesh. He is just one of five coaches the team have had since that year.

Who then would consider such a role? Woolmer had suffered tribulations of his own during his coaching career: a small but significant culture of recreational drugs at Warwickshire and the match-fixing scandal of South Africa happened on his watch, the latter involving matches against Pakistan at home and away.

So what induced him to take the job? Not the money, for it is not thought to have been highly paid, certainly not sufficiently so for the nature of the job. His was not a glamorous lifestyle, based as it was in small accommodation on site at Pakistan's national academy in Lahore, and then travelling, staying in countless hotels with a team of different culture, ethnicity, religion and language.

His wife and family, meanwhile, remained at home in Cape Town. So it must have been the challenge of somehow trying to bring order to the most talented nation of them all, and the most volatile.

Woolmer was an evangelist who fervently believed that he could succeed where all others had failed, but who became disillusioned and depressed as each day and each new crisis came along. By the end there were tales of factionalism and even, on the team bus after the defeat by Ireland, of a physical altercation.

The challenge of Pakistan cricket is one facing no other nation. There is a first-class structure in name only and it is rife with nepotism, so much so that Imran Khan, when captain, chose to cut through it and pick those who had impressed him. Waqar Younis was one such. A coach has to be able to do just that in order to assemble a squad and run the risk of accusations of favouritism. Pick one from Karachi and Lahore is up in arms. Choose from the north and Karachi takes offence.

Woolmer's relationship with the captain, Inzamam-ul-Haq, was undermined consistently: Inzy ruled the roost every bit as autocratically as Sourav Ganguly did India, marginalising the coach sometimes to the point of humiliation.

Inzamam apparently recognised Woolmer's qualities as a human being (who could not?) but the captain's comments on his death - a "good" coach - damned him with faint praise. The refusal of the team to take the field at The Oval last summer depressed and disillusioned him to the point of offering his resignation, and the steroids found to have been taken by Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif were something about which he is sure to have had suspicions and he may well have instigated the tests. He has also had a continuing problem with Shoaib's action, believing it rarely to be legal, but he was unable to prevent the paceman's selection.

And all the while there was the public scrutiny allied to fanatical support. It is a tough person who is not disturbed by death threats and effigy-burning, however token they may be, and Woolmer had endured more than his share. By the end, when he packed his laptop sadly into his kitbag and prepared to leave Sabina Park, he was clear that his time with Pakistan was coming to an end. Back in Multan, meanwhile, crowds gathered outside Inzamam's residence and chanted: "Death to Inzamam, death to Bob Woolmer."