Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

43 Behind the old red brick pavilion at Lord’s is a small attractive rose garden, which was the background for a team photograph. Afterwards, rather than lead his team the customary way through the Long Room onto the field, Carmody led his men through a gap at the side of this wonderful old pavilion. I don’t think this was done before or since. Such was Keith Carmody, a practical man. Mark Rowe reinforces Miller’s suggestion that Carmody’s strong character ‘left a lasting imprint on the Lord’s hierarchy’. Delayed by an unduly fussy photographer, the captain chose the unorthodox route to avoid ‘keeping the umpires and 30,000 spectators waiting’. At tea, ‘Sir Pelham Warner cornered Carmody and told him he had committed a serious offence and that it was not to happen again.’ This breach of old-world protocol at ‘the home of cricket’ had no impact on public admiration for Carmody’s team, now greater in England than in Australia. In a letter to the Sydney Daily Telegraph on 15 July 1944 Gubby Allen disagreed ‘with the Australian view that Carmody and most of the RAAF lads in England are below standard’, although only a few had ‘any chance of getting into a full-strength Australian XI. Sismey seems certain to be included and Keith Miller should if he steadies down. Carmody’s methods are very sound. He has a great variety of strokes.’ Despite the approval of playing contemporaries, notably Miller and Sismey, the significance of Carmody’s captaincy in 1943 and 1944, often against more famous players, has received much less attention from cricket historians than his invention of the ‘umbrella field’. The received wisdom in numerous publications is that this unique contribution to cricket tactics was devised in 1945, when he had surrendered the captaincy of the Australian Services team to Lindsay Hassett, not in the preceding years when his leadership was unchallenged. Some sources mention that it was the product of discussions between Carmody and his fellow New South Welshmen, Sismey and Roper, at the Strand Palace Hotel in London. Because Keith had only just returned to Britain after months as a PoW and weeks of uncertainty in the face of the Soviet advance, the story is especially attractive. It would have seemed even more so if those who have reiterated it had seen Keith’s own record of his imprisonment. Included in his ‘Prisoner of War Log’ is a neat drawing of eight catchers – five on the off, three on the leg side – crouching around a wicketkeeper with enormous gloves. Appealing though it is to think of a fertile In the Air and on the Field with the RAAF