The International Cricket Council (ICC) made the correct decision not to abandon the World Cup, despite what the Jamaican police say was the murder, in his Kingston hotel room, of Pakistan's coach Bob Woolmer.

To call off the tournament would be to besmirch this great game by having it, and its governing establishment, cower before malodorous elements. But worse, such an action would have been a stain on the memory of Bob Woolmer, the cricketer, and an unkind cut to Caribbean nations that have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to host the Cricket World Cup.

The tournament need not, as some have suggested, go to tatters. Indeed, it is the responsibility of the players in their performances on the field, with the support of the organisers, to deliver what Chris Dehring, the CEO of CWC 2007, promised at the start of the tournament would be the best World Cup ever. We owe that to the nearly two billion fans of the sport around the world.

Of course, the gloom of the passing of Bob Woolmer cannot be totally lifted from the tournament. And no one would want it to be shunted aside. For whatever the motive behind his killing, he was a serious and passionate cricketer and a good and thoughtful coach, dedicated to his players. Hopefully, police investigators and the cricketing world can make sense of the death; and maybe something good, as improbable as that may now seem, can be salvaged from it.

In the meantime, there are opportunities for rescuing the World Cup. Timing and geography contribute to this; the fact that the Caribbean hosts of the tournament do not share a contiguous land mass, but are islands separated by hundreds of miles of water.

With yesterday's completion of the matches in the preliminary round, the tournament now shifts to the southern Caribbean to countries like Antigua and Guyana, more than 1,000 miles from Jamaica. These territories will provide a different atmosphere and environment. The change should allow for a greater concentration on cricket without the Bob Woolmer affair looming so large.

The Jamaican authorities, in that respect, have a month's respite, until a semi-final match is played here, from the constant, round-the-clock international media focus on the country and on Woolmer's death. In that time, the Jamaican police will hopefully have made good progress in their investigations and, if they have not yet done so, will be close to bringing Woolmer's murderer(s) to justice. It seems that this was no random killing and that Woolmer may have known his attacker(s) and perhaps voluntarily let them into his room.

By the time the tournament returns to Kingston, perhaps Jamaican authorities will have pulled together a public communication strategy, which has been badly lacking this past week, so as not to lose all the early gains from being a host of the Cricket World Cup. But the work begins before April 24.

Some of the lustre has been rubbed from the tournament, but it need not be a dud, as some may hope.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.