Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

118 Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia content to live in Western Australia.’ It has proved impossible to verify this story and potentially shed further light on whether he’d acquired appropriate skills in his ill-defined pre-war work as a ‘clerk’. The only certainties are that he remained in the West for over a decade longer and that in the more immediate future the state’s cricket still struggled under conditions imposed by the others. In early 1956, after months of wrangling, 55 Bradman’s intervention persuaded the Interstate Conference to resolve that ‘Western Australia be admitted to the Sheffield Shield Competition on a full basis as from this date.’ But the price Bradman exacted was that the WACA was to subsidise the trans-continental travel of the other states by paying each a subsidy of £550 every season. Keith Carmody didn’t play under the new system. The arguments that preceded its adoption and the resentment that soon accompanied payment of the subsidy were further reminders of difficulties that would have confronted anybody attempting to establish first-class cricket in the West. Unfortunately, while Carmody and the WACA had the same fundamental problem, the goodwill between them had virtually evaporated ever since Carmody’s resignation as coach. There was no thought on either side that Keith might resume the coaching position in 1955, when the WACA ended Badcock’s series of one-year, part-time appointments, replacing him with Ken Meuleman. In that same year Keith’s responsibilities grew with the birth of a second daughter, Kelly. In any case, from 1951 to 1955 cricket had already come second to endeavours to provide for his family. 55 In late 1955 WACA chairman Alf Randell and Alan Barnes of New South Wales, honorary secretary of the Interstate Conference, argued bitterly about whether a September meeting had admitted Western Australia permanently to the Sheffield Shield on a still restricted basis or full-time for a guaranteed five years only.