Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

103 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia your back foot in line with the off stump and play correct shots to balls outside it.’ Although Rutherford played only a single Test for Australia – against India on return from the 1956 tour of England – his own later career, he freely acknowledged, was testimony to Carmody’s abiding influence. As junior coach for the WACA over many years he had a role in the preparation of no fewer than six future Test players. He would be the last to claim major credit for coaching such as Rod Marsh, Ross Edwards and John Inverarity. In fact Inverarity insisted that ‘we used to help each other’, just as much as being trained by a coach – a comment that applied just as much to long-serving Shield team coach Daryl Foster. But Bob Massie, whom Rutherford taught at Mount Lawley High School in Perth and then as a state colt, remembered him as a ‘very tough’ coach who said ‘I wouldn’t get anywhere without learning to bowl outswing’ and then proceeded to tell him how to perfect the delivery that caused mayhem at Lord’s in 1972. Rutherford encouraged Terry Jenner, who came to Perth from Corrigin in country Western Australia as a wicketkeeper/batsman, to develop the leg spin he later deployed for South Australia and Australia before becoming the mentor of Shane Warne. Rutherford, he recalled in 1995, was ‘very influential’, an excellent coach. For his part, Rutherford said his own coaching method was entirely Carmody’s, with the single exception that his cards on those in his care were never kept secret from the young players in question. 45 In 1948, when a process that turned Western Australia into the most powerful state in the 1970s and 1980s was only just beginning, its main inspiration produced an illustrated text-book, Keith Carmody on Cricket , which, as The Western Mail accurately reported in July 1948, explained ‘in an easy and conversational style how cricket should be played’. 46 If his own performances in the next first-class season fell short of the standards he was recommending, it wasn’t yet clear his batting was in terminal decline. And even as a disastrous 1948/49 season unfolded, an unexpectedly rapid courtship sustained the buoyant mood with which he’d begun his new life in the West. * * * * * * * 45 The sixth future Test player coached as a junior by Rutherford was Barry Shepherd, whose emergence in country Western Australia is discussed below. 46 Keith Johnson, Keith’s friend from Mosman and RAAF days, wrote a Foreword for the book.