Few cases can have been as woolly and as difficult to penetrate by the police as that concerning the death of cricket coach Bob Woolmer, who died in Jamaica in March.

The toing-and-froing over whether Woolmer - an Englishman who lived in South Africa and coached the Pakistan team - was murdered or had died of natural cases is turning the investigation from being a great 'whodunnit' into a farcical soap opera.

Woolmer died not too many hours after his team, Pakistan, one of the game's powerhouses, lost humiliatingly to the minnows Ireland, in the opening rounds of the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean. Initially, it was assumed that the shock of the upset may have brought on a massive coronary some of the apparent symptoms that accompanied his death caused many people to be suspicious. Among the early speculation was that he was poisoned.

For Jamaica, which had invested heavily in hosting a segment of the World Cup and not having the best of international images with regard to homicides, death by natural causes would have been the better of a bad outcome. So too, it would have been for the organisers of the Cricket World Cup, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the owners of the event, the International Cricket Council (ICC). For the death of a participant in the event, especially someone of the stature of Bob Woolmer, would detract and distract from events on the field. Murder had the potential for drawing a long, dark pall over the entire tournament.

The Jamaican police initially said that the pathology findings on the cause of death were inconclusive; they were soon reporting that Woolmer had died from asphyxiation caused by manual strangulation. The report of the cause of death unleashed speculation that his death may have had to do with likely revelations of his discovery of match-fixing in the Pakistan team, an issue with which Woolmer has not been totally unfamiliar given his previous stint as coach of the South African team when they were caught in a match-fixing scandal.

Since then, there have been claims that he was poisoned before being strangled; and also claims by Pakistani detectives that he wasn't murdered - the latter point which might have been interpreted as an attempt to draw attention away from Pakistan and its citizens as suspects in a crime.

But now, as this newspaper has reported, Scotland Yard investigators, former colleagues of Mark Shields, who is leading the Jamaican investigation, are now also suggesting that there was no murder; that Woolmer died from natural causes.

From what the Jamaicans are saying, this is an about-face by Scotland Yard, whose detectives came to Jamaica to review the Jamaican probe and had declared themselves satisfied with its direction.

The local constabulary continues to insist that the forensic report on Woolmer's death points to murder. Anything else at this point, they say, is speculation.

The now-it-is-now-it-isn't spectacle being played out in the international media over Woolmer's death must be particularly upsetting to his family and makes Jamaica's constabulary appear a bunch of incompetent boobs. It couldn't hurt the investigation, we feel, to publish the pathology report so as to clear the air.

There should also be some official statement why the scheduled coroner's inquest appears to have been postponed indefinitely.