Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

58 team practice’, selected his team for the second ‘Test’ and spent three hours ‘watering and scraping the pitch’. The following day he ‘worked on cricket pitch all day’ before recording that he was now ‘STRIPPED – 151 lbs’. Whether he saw this weight as a triumph of conditioning or a symptom of decay is unclear. But there can be no doubting the frustration boiling beneath his account of the defeat that ensued in the second ‘Test’. He ‘lost the toss again’ and his team, sent in to bat, made 95, of which his own six came from one shot before he was ‘given out LBW after hitting onto my pad’. Although Pearson’s bowling had slowed the England reply and Keith had made one stumping, ‘Kellshaw the West Indian was dropped off Ken Todd twice’, perhaps by Keith himself, who concluded ‘I had so spoiled our chances of winning’. His team won an ensuing softball game 13 to 8, but he damaged both his thumbs, ‘which are now bound.’ He was ‘very ill’ the following day and vomited in the evening. The only good news was the end of his six weeks of ‘stooging’, promising ‘six weeks of well-earned rest’. But neither relaxation nor physical recovery improved his cricketing morale. In a low-scoring inter-block game on 5 September, ‘going in second last I was caught on the boundary off the first ball for the first time in my life.’ Keith and his companions must soon have learned that on the day of the second ‘Kriege Test’, 25 August, the Germans surrendered Paris to the advancing Allies, led into the city symbolically by the French Second Armoured Division. With grim defensive battles under way in Italy and on the eastern front, crumbling German morale may well explain his 6 September ‘Log’ entry: ‘owing to panic, three goons saying they would close the sports field’. The threat didn’t stop the Australian cricketers gaining some revenge during an ensuing ‘gala sports day’, which also included softball between East and West Canada and a two-nil defeat of England by ‘the Rest’ in a soccer match. After scoring 101, Australia dismissed England for 58 and reduced them to nine for 44 in a second innings. Keith’s grumpy entries showed that again his team relied on Pearson’s bowling – three for 41 and seven for 18 – rather than his own contributions. He’d lost the toss ‘as usual’ and scored only five before being ‘caught down the leg side – a ropey decision’. If there was another star performer, it was Bruce Keen, who’d taken four for five in the first innings. Keith’s brief note gives no indication of Keen’s bowling style. But the way the slow left-arm spinner Pearson dominated the bowling, in all the matches recorded in August and September, makes it Prisoner of War