Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

24 Keith’s highest score in three matches was 47 in the second innings against Queensland in November in Brisbane, while McCabe was making 88 and 57. Immediately after that match Keith’s seven and 36 run out were overshadowed by Barnes’ 144 and Don Tallon’s response of 152 for a combined Queensland and Victoria side that also included the young Keith Miller. Whether the Miller/Carmody friendship had now begun is impossible to say. More certain is that Carmody was seeing a lot of Barnes, who heavily out-scored him in their last two pre-war first-class games, 11 a superiority that didn’t prevent him becoming one of Keith’s greatest admirers in post-war Australia. Keith had failed to consolidate a clear first-class future but for Mosman his aggregate 567 was the club’s best. Opening in all matches, ‘he played particularly bright cricket’ with a top score of 91. At the start of the 1941/42 season he appeared alongside such Sydney notables as O’Reilly, McCabe, Barnes, Fingleton and Arthur Morris in a match ‘for patriotic funds’ at Mosman Oval, to which the club had returned in 1939/40. On 11 October 1941 he reported to Number 2 Recruiting Centre, Sydney, and was classified medically fit for flying duties. But even now there was one more chance for him to be compared to McCabe. In the words of Charlie Macartney, the two provided an orgy of run-getting … at Mosman Oval when they rendered the Balmain attack helpless by relentless punishment … S.J.McCabe was the outstanding performer and he supplied a delicious and snappy piece of batting. Little inferior was Keith Carmody, whose half-century came from a continuous flow of beautifully timed strokes all round the wicket. Macartney’s article appeared on 8 December 1941 – in Japan and Australia – but it was still 7 December in the continental United States where it would remain forever ‘the day of infamy’ marking the attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. While the United States’ immediate declaration of war on Japan threatened to bring the new global conflict closer to Australia, the Carmody family suffered a more personal blow on the last day of the year with the death from a cerebral haemorrhage of Keith’s mother, Annie Ada Carmody, at the age of 53. 11 Keith’s seven and 32 against South Australia at the SCG in early December were overshadowed by Barnes’ first-innings 108. In late January 1941 Barnes made 132 and 55 in a match at the SCG won by Victoria, while Keith made just 21 and seven. Escape From Poverty