Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

113 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia though accounts of his coaching of juniors refer almost exclusively to his focus on batting technique. 52 His constant reminders to seam bowlers to concentrate on good length on or just outside off stump may again seem a standard fundamental. But he also had a flair for surprise changes by bringing on ‘mug bowlers’, on one occasion telling Edwards himself to ‘have a bowl’ against South Australia. Immediately after taking a ‘lucky wicket’ Edwards was taken off. Oddly enough he rarely brought himself on as a mug bowler The captain’s greatest departure from bowling orthodoxy was his conversion of Charlie Puckett into a dual-purpose bowler. Puckett had a great pre-war reputation as a baseballer chosen in several all-Australian teams. As a cricketer, his misfortune was to play for the state for the first time in 1939 and then wait until he was 35 to resume his career after the war. He belied his age and earned the title ‘iron man’ by playing until 1953, taking 158 wickets (113 in the Shield) in 37 first-class matches. But this achievement was possible only because Carmody persuaded him to develop off-spin – timely advice after The West Australian reported that he’d ‘lost much of his sting’ and could ‘scarcely be regarded as an opening bowler suitable for Shield cricket’ even before his fast-medium brought him selection in a Test trial in the 1946/47 season, when his one for 55 made him no threat to such as Lindwall or Johnston. He would thereafter often open the bowling before changing to off-spin, using the same run-up for both methods: his main attribute, recalled Edwards, was ‘incredible accuracy’. The changes Keith imposed on Tom O’Dwyer were in tactics rather than method. The left-arm spinner, said Edwards, had always wanted three men on the boundary. The captain’s response – ‘if you need three men, you’re bowling badly!’ – was to allow him only one. Of course such attacking instincts were most famously revealed in the ‘umbrella’ or ‘Carmody’ field that earned applause and emulation around Australia and – especially after Lindsay Hassett used it regularly in 1953 – in England as well. In 1954 Douglas Jardine, venturing into Australia as a businessman, praised the captaincy of the recently retired Hassett. Attending Hassett’s 52 Keith Slater – eventually notorious as an alleged ‘chucker’ in a match against MCC in 1958 , yet picked for his only Test later that season – attended Keith’s coaching sessions at Boans as a teenager but, he said, never had any bowling coaching throughout his career: ‘No one knew too much about bowling!’ he told this writer in 1996.