Shaphan

Woolmer's final interview (Pt 2)

Tuesday afternoon, I emailed the Jamaican police.

Dear Jamaican Police

Re murder of Bob Woolmer

I am writing to draw your attention to a piece of evidence that may or may not be significant to your inquiry.  The press have not reported it and thus I am unsure as to whether your detectives know about it or not.  On the evening before he died, some hours after the Ireland match, Woolmer was interviewed by the BBC's Alison Mitchell.  I heard it on (I think, from memory) Radio Five Live here in the UK.  He was asked to explain the performance of the Pakistan team.  He said he couldn't explain the batting display and that three of the dismissals had been inexplicable - he then named the three individuals (I think they were Yousuf, Azar Mahmood and Kamran Akmal, but I only heard the interview once, that evening, so my memory is fallible).  It was an extraordinary moment, because he was, in coded language but in effect, accusing some of the batsmen of having deliberately lost their wickets.  That's what I believe I heard that evening.  If you haven't done so already, I urge you to track it down and listen to it.  I think it was recorded at the hotel and may well have been his final interview.

Good luck with your work,

Faithfully,

Two hours later I got I nice email back:

Good Day,

Thanks very much for the information.  Your email will be forwarded to the Investigating Officer.

Warm regards,

That evening, Alison Mitchell was called into the BBC studio and made to talk about Woolmer's last interview on the TMS podcast [27min.ff].  She said she had thought the contents of the interview had been "absolutely innocuous".  After the interview is replayed [34min.ff], Mitchell reads out the number of the police hotline for any information on Bob's murder, but she does not mention that she had been sitting on this interview for ten days, blissfully unaware that the police (and Woolmer's family) might be interested in what Woolmer had to say hours before he was killed.

[Download bbctestmatchspecialpodcast_20070327-2200_40_st.mp3 - TMS Podcast 2007/03/27:  Right-click to download]

The transcript of the interview is also now online.  It is not as revelatory as I had remembered it, but his disillusionment with Pakistan cricket comes though loud and clear.  [The transcript doesn't do justice to the interview, which is better heard than read.] 

Alison Mitchell (AM): What are your thoughts on losing to Ireland?

Bob Woolmer (BW):  "We batted abysmally, really - just made mistake after mistake after mistake. It just compounded, and eventually we were 40 to 50 runs short.

"But I have to say we made some very injudicious shot selections - Mohammad Yousuf, Kamran Akmal and Azhar Mahmood are three off the top of my head who were playing shots which weren't necessary at the time.

"That's sad because two-and-a-half or three years' work has gone in to this, and to fall out like this is very disappointing." [More]

Bob Woolmer's last (?) interview

(Condolences to Woolmer's family and friends.)

On the evening before he was murdered, some hours after Pakistan had unexpectedly lost against Ireland, Bob Woolmer gave an interview to the BBC, which I heard on Five Live.  The (female?) interviewer asked him to explain the woeful batting display by his team.  He agreed that it had been a terrible performance, and said that the dismissals of three of the batsmen had been inexplic...  Here he stopped, checked himself, and then said that the dismissals of - and here he named the three batsmen - were inexplicable.  I think the names he gave were Mohammad Yousuf, Azhar Mahmood and Kamran Akmal (although I've bolstered my memory with this Cricinfo report [link]).

I've since looked at the dismissals on YouTube and agree that all three, but especially the last two, appear soft, but I'd also point to the other Pakistan dismissals that are caught in the slips.  Some of the Pakistani batsman appear to be giving the Irish slip-fielding practice.  I've tried to have a soft spot for Inzamam-ul-Haq over the years but I'm afraid his dismissal looks even softer than the three spotlighted by Woolmer. It appears to me, and I'm sure it did to Woolmer, that the Pakistan team deliberately threw the match.  All ten Pakistani wickets were catches - no LBWs, stumpings or run outs.

In that (last?) radio interview, I thought Bob Woolmer's frustrations overcame him.  Even though there was one more match to play in the World Cup, and he was still under contract with the PCB for months, it sounded as though his hurt pride would not tolerate him staying quiet about his suspicions of what had happened that day.  So he named names.  I think that, in his bewilderment, he threw caution to the wind, believing perhaps that he was in a strong enough position, and close enough to the exit-door, to do so.  But it seems like he wasn't.

I'm not suggesting that any of the above-named players was the murderer - I am suggesting that Woolmer, in that radio interview, crossed a line that he couldn't uncross; he had become an insider starting to blow the whistle; and that he created a mortal enemy or enemies in so doing.

Well, that's my theory, anyway. I hope the Beeb has the nous to recognize the possible import of that interview and to send it to the Jamaican police.

Mercury direct

Mercury has been retrograde in my eleventh house, which is my excuse for not having blogged recently.  Since last I wrote, I have been liberated from an abusive relationship of thirty-three years. Thanks to this post at Obsolete, I finally hit rock bottom and woke up from my state of denial.  In the early days of the relationship, in the early Seventies, it had lured me in with Jill Tweedie and James Cameron,and I had became hooked.  Lacking a strong sense of self, I gladly took on the identity of a Guardian reader.  But it has changed and so have I, and I should have left it long ago.

The Zoë Williams story was the final straw.  When I first read the Obsolete piece, I assumed he'd copied most of it from Private Eye, but I've since learned that the Eye only had a tiny paragraph on it, so hats off to Septicisle for digging up the, er, dirt and presenting it so clearly.  I felt sullied, having read it.  I half-expected Williams to resign or be sacked - if it had been the NYT, she would, for bringing the paper, its readers and her profession into disrepute - but then I remembered that this was the newspaper that had launched Operation Clark County, which had helped swing the '04 election to Cheney and Bush.  Its perpetrators, Alan Rusbridger and Ian Katz, not only did not resign, nor were sacked by the Scott Trust, but the latter got a promotion and the former got paid half a million quid last year, via a 14.7% salary increase and £175000 bonus, for turning the Guardian into a comic.  They are Zoë Williams' superiors,and given that she wouldn't going, I felt I had to.

The only things I really looked forward to in the Guardian were Doonesbury, which the aforementioned then-G2 editor Ian Katz tried to drop at the relaunch on the grounds that Guardian readers weren't clever enough to understand it, and which I can still read at Slate, and the Corrections' column, although it never corrected nearly as much as it should have.  I won't miss the daily, centrefold photograph, which symbolized for me the triumph of the image over the word ('In the beginning was the image, sayeth the Guardian'), turning the readers into voyeurs; the 'people' column, which was about celebrities' lives; the gambling-advice pages in the sports section; all of the G2 section, save for Doonesbury; Steve Bell; its relentless obsession with popular culture; et al.

So, now I'm a free man, liberated from the unbearable lightness of being a Guardian reader.  Thanks to Zoë Williams and to Obsolete for helping to facilitate this act of liberation.

p.s. This was the paragraph in Private Eye, appended to a story on Peter Hitchens.

P.S. Hitchens may not be the only hack to be a victim of cyber-mischief.  The entry on online encyclopedia Wikipedia for Guardian journalist Zoe Williams was recently amended, with the insertion of the phrases "highly regarded", "witty articles" and "critically acclaimed".  The user who made the revisions? One "Zoewilliams". [PE 1179: 7]