Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

111 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia likely to build a formidable reputation in one or more sports. 51 But when Shepherd again paraded his cricket prowess in 1952, both the D.K.Carmody Trophy he held aloft and the victory of the country juniors he led over those from the city did underline the significance of Keith’s work in rural areas. These successes cannot hide the fact that the events of January 1951 marked the end of the exhilaration and optimism of Carmody’s early years in the West. His relationship with the WACA remained strained but stopped short of complete alienation as long as he continued to play. Although it had been ludicrous for the authorities not to acknowledge that his coaching priority was focused on early teenagers, there was every reason for them to be disappointed with his batting. The 59 against MCC the previous October proved to be his highest score in a season yielding only 108 runs in six first-class innings, his average a mere 18.00. It wasn’t only a mediocre average of 23.55 in 1951/52 that saw him dropped in 1952/53. Before the season began he drove to Sydney with Ruth and Jill for a holiday and the selectors weren’t prepared to consider him for the South African tourists’ first match ‘without his having played some cricket here this summer’. Deprived of the chance to join his protégé Rutherford in his first-class debut, Keith didn’t play for his club, East Perth, until late January and missed the whole first-class season. Three more seasons until the end of 1955/56 yielded averages of 27.00, 33.00 and 29.57, with six fifties and no centuries – modest improvements that still fell far short of the standards he’d set in 1947/48 and of the qualities that had enthused those who’d known him in the emotionally charged atmosphere of wartime Britain. The later stages of Keith’s life make it tempting to jump to the conclusion that alcohol was already a major problem in the early 1950s. Nearly all his contemporaries remarked on his drinking and some disapproved, but none mentioned it as the reason for his poor batting record – not even Wally Langdon, who disliked both Carmody and social drinking. Allan Edwards, who knew him best, agreed his drinking ‘was apparent from the start’ but thought captaincy distraction was more important. He never drank during matches and Allan never saw him drunk even on social occasions: ‘after three hours drinking you’d never know he’d had even one’. Aileen Edwards remarked that he sometimes became ‘snooty’ at parties, wanting to leave early because there was cricket next day. 51 In Australian football Shepherd’s anointment as best player in the interstate schools’ carnival in 1951 led to serious overtures from the Richmond club in Melbourne; he also played for the state, the strongest in Australia, at hockey.