Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

55 was not pleased. The wicket was plain earth: any grass was there by sheer accident and not intent! Somehow we managed to make a flat pitch for the required 22 yards but it was also very stony. Most of the cricket involved teams drawn from groups of huts, and arranged in graded leagues, rather than between nationalities. But an England versus Australia dimension inevitably emerged among the better players. Two weeks after his arrival, Keith was determined to take his first practice match at Belaria seriously. On 14 July he called an evening pre-game meeting after spending much of the day working on the pitch. Low scores the next day confirmed both its wretched nature and his determination to take the occasion seriously. He kept wicket before being out lbw for four in a ‘very poor innings’, but led his team to a winning total of nine for 63. In regular practice matches in the last two weeks of July he focused especially on coaching Pearson, developing a new, but unspecified, style in his slow left-arm bowling. 27 He bowled ‘rather well’ taking three for 14 as ‘B’ block was dismissed for 63 in response to six for 145 declared, with Keith scoring 24. This match and one a week later, in which Pearson took seven for 26 and four for 26 and Keith hurt his ankle, were preparation for the inaugural ‘Kriege Test match’ 28 between Australia and England on 12 August. Keith led an Australian team that included his fellow New South Welshmen, Todd and Maguire from his own hut, and Keen and Pearson. After Pearson had taken eight for 70 in England’s 127, Keith was out for 62 in 26 minutes and the Australians were two for 109. But they were all out for 126. Years later Pearson could remember the sports field was ‘bare, rough and stony’ but nothing about any of the cricket except that for this match ‘we were heavily backed to win and didn’t.’ His lack of more detailed recall is surprising because it was from this period that Keith began to see his Mosman colleague as a potential first-class player, a projected future that would find its way into the Australian press at the end of the war. In the following two weeks Keith continued to coach Pearson, practised his own batting, trained umpires and adjudicated several low-grade matches. He also sharpened eye and fitness with innumerable softball games. On 24 August he held an ‘Aussie 27 The description of his later bowling by Mosman historian John Hiscox may provide a clue as to Pearson’s re-modelled style: he was ‘incredibly accurate, quite slow through the air’. 28 ‘Krieges’ was adopted by the Allied PoWs as a shortened form of the German ‘Kriegsgefangenen’ for ‘prisoners of war’. Prisoner of War