Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

112 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia Lawrie Sawle agreed ‘he was a good drinker’ but his philosophy was: ‘Do what you like off the field, but don’t let it start affecting you on the field. People should know what’s best for themselves.’ Although Keith Miller would have been unlikely to condemn him for drinking, in 1952 he was clearly thinking of the era of their close wartime friendship, when he nominated Keith captain of the hypothetical ‘eleven I’d really like to play for … Carmody (captain), Lindwall, Harvey, W.Johnston, Tallon (Australia); Compton, Edrich, Wright (England); Nourse, Mann (South Africa); Worrell, Weekes (West Indies).’ Miller’s acclaim for ‘a brilliant strokemaker’ may have had a hollow ring by now, while Western Australia’s record sat awkwardly with the great allrounder’s praise for Keith’s ‘happy knack of getting the best out of players’. Yet, as most contemporaries in the state and some important ones outside argued, his captaincy was still invaluable to the Sheffield Shield’s newest state. * * * * * * * To explore the nature of Carmody’s captaincy it’s necessary to rely heavily on the testimony of Allan Edwards, a playing contemporary interviewed both in the 1990s and in 2011. After ‘the bigwig’ arrived from Sydney as ‘just a name’, he quickly became a close friend, making Edwards an invaluable witness to Keith’s life on and off the field throughout his years in the West. Proving ‘very easy to get on with’, Keith quickly impressed most of his new players through excellent analysis of their mostly unfamiliar opponents. His detailed knowledge of numerous individuals, largely acquired after just one postwar Shield season, raises the unanswerable question of whether he’d compiled a card index system of the kind he soon kept on juniors and eventually revealed to the young John Rutherford. Edwards’ assertion that Keith made local players ‘do things they weren’t used to’ suggests how much the state’s top players had been disadvantaged by isolation from the main centres of Australian cricket. His stress on the importance of running between the wickets and the need to turn over the strike with short singles is a method that may seem obvious everywhere, but one that exponents such as Bob Simpson have told this writer were especially Australian priorities. Introducing no new practice drills and holding no regular team meetings, Keith’s method was to deal individually with the special needs of each member of an initially very inexperienced team. He ‘paid a lot of attention to the bowlers’, said Edwards, even