Bob Woolmer dies at 58

This is agonisingly sad. Pakistan's coach, Bob Woolmer, has died at the age of just 58.

We've always liked Bob Woolmer. He was an Englishman with a broad world view. He was born in India, coached South Africa and was now lending his expertise to the Pakistani cause.

He was a progressive man too. You'll be hard-pressed to find an obituary that doesn't mention how he was at the forefront in the use of technology in coaching. Not that he let that go too far. He knew that players weren't robots and that cricket is above all a mind game. Bob Woolmer believed that a happy player was a good player. This seems a fairer reflection of a man who always seemed genial, laid-back and above all, honest.

It could have been sad that his final act as a coach was to oversee a humiliating upset at the hands of Ireland and as a consequence Pakistan's failure in the World Cup. Fortunately, it seems that the cricketing community has a far longer memory than that and that loss has been buried beneath a heap of praise and respect the volume of the Himalayan mountain range. Good. That's the way it should be.

It's hard to know how to end this obituary. I'm going to use a quote from Bob's website, which was a fascinating read, particularly when he first took over Pakistan and was taking stock of the talent at his disposal. We remember him commenting that there seemed to be another six world-class pace bowlers turning up at the nets each day.

Anyway, the quote's a bit hackneyed, but the philosophy's worthy and it sums up Bob Woolmer's approach to coaching.

“Your mind is like a parachute - if it does not open it will not work.”