Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

124 John Meillon, the two taking it in turns to make the preparations. She was unaware that prominent Mosman-born actor Meillon had a well-known affinity with alcohol that went far beyond his celebrated TV advertisements for beer. Superficially even more reassuring was a ‘really close’ barrister friend, John Maddocks. Mosman captain David Lord, soon to become one of Sydney’s leading sports journalists, 57 had a very different view of that friendship. He found the drinking habits of Keith and ‘his close mate John Maddocks’ so objectionable that ‘I had to bar them both from the Mosman dressing-room when I was captain. I went so far as to lock them both out!’ In response to a question about the possibility he worked for Rothmans, Lord didn’t believe ‘he was employed by anyone’ in this period in Sydney. Underlying Lord’s extreme criticism was a feeling that Keith had betrayed his own reputation and failed future generations: ‘To be fair, Carmody did make his mark in first-class cricket, the umbrella field his brilliant innovation.’ His behaviour was a tragedy ‘when he had so much to offer: his knowledge and experience were priceless.’ Lord’s hostile views, formed when he was club captain at much the same period that Carmody was made state coach, are at odds with all others this writer consulted who knew him in this last stage of his life. Barry Knight’s impressions were admittedly superficial and allrounder David Colley didn’t provide detail in describing Keith’s Mosman coaching as a ‘significant’ factor in his own development towards an 87-match first-class and three-Test cricket career. But John Hiscox spoke with authority as an active committee member at the time and eventually both president and historian of the club. John was unaware of any occasion when Keith had been locked out of the dressing-room: although he ‘loved his beer’, social drinking at Mosman’s Buena Vista Hotel after cricket practice was unsullied by drunken behaviour. Making no claims to close friendship, John’s most specific memory was of a bet made one day against Keith’s prediction that Geoffrey Boycott was such a fine batsman he would make a century in his imminent next innings for England. The occasion can only have been the Third Test of the 1977 Ashes series, at Trent Bridge in late June, when Boycott, with an innings of 107, returned to the England side in triumph after a long self-imposed absence from 57 As a player manager, Lord enraged Kerry Packer by encouraging Jeff Thomson to defect from World Series Cricket and Alvin Kallicharran not to join it. In 1983 he was organiser of the first, unsuccessful attempt to make rugby union a professional sport. From Kalamunda to Sydney