Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

126 in Sydney first, Kelly quickly urged her mother to join her, Jill and Russell. Assisted financially by her employer, the chief justice of Nova Scotia, Ruth arrived determined to take Keith back to Canada to nurse him through the course of his illness. Although its advanced stage thwarted this plan, her intention was no empty gesture. Jill and Russell rushed back to Perth to retrieve Keith’s marriage certificate, needed for his application for a passport, returning to Sydney too late to be alongside Ruth and Kelly when he died on 20 October 1977. All four could draw comfort that Keith had been aware of their renewed commitment. His funeral at an Anglican church was attended by large numbers of first-class and Test cricketers and – perhaps as a gesture to unreconstructed members of his broader Irish-Australian family – a Catholic priest. In one eulogy Mosman contemporary Ken Gulliver described the eleven-year-old Keith’s refuge in cricket from the family shop. In Keith Miller’s address ‘Bendy’ was an affectionate but unexplained nickname for ‘the practical man’, still his ideal captain, who just once had annoyed Plum Warner by flouting the supposedly sacrosanct traditions of Lord’s. Most importantly, it was now that Miller emphasised that the ‘umbrella field’ was conceived in 1944, not during the Victory ‘Tests’ a year later. No doubt informal discussions before and after the service reflected on that unique Carmody innovation as well as on the sadness of his last years in Sydney. Equally certain is that such assembled legends as Miller, Arthur Morris and even the New Zealander, Martin Donnelly 59 – domiciled in Sydney since 1950 – discussed the revolution currently transforming cricket. Carmody’s wager about Boycott with John Hiscox suggests he was still following Test cricket closely and aware of the unprecedented consternation that had overtaken the game with the revelation, early in that tour, of Kerry Packer’s coup in signing so many of the world’s best players for World Series Cricket. It took Bill O’Reilly in The Sydney Morning Herald to bring the two talking points together just three weeks after Keith’s death. He suggested sarcastically that Packer’s power over pay packets should have been enough of a ‘big stick’ 59 Donnelly, the much admired left-hand batsman, probably met Keith during the 1945 cricket season, when he appeared in many matches for New Zealand Services teams and a couple for Dominions and British Empire teams, though none under Keith’s captaincy. In the immediate post-war years he played rugby union for Oxford University and once for England against Ireland in Dublin. From Kalamunda to Sydney