Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

7 Introduction According to an article in The Cricketer enshrined in cyberspace by the espncricinfo website, Keith Carmody has a secure place in cricket history as one of the game’s six great innovators. Among many errors in that citation is an assertion about the year in which the famous ‘umbrella’ or ‘Carmody’ field was devised, an issue clarified in the pages below. No such uncertainty surrounds its introduction into the Sheffield Shield by Carmody himself as captain-coach of Western Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But when Lindsay Hassett used it early in the Australian tour of England in 1953, former England captain Freddie Brown challenged Carmody’s originality: If Keith Carmody, the West Australian captain, introduced this kind of field to Australia I do not mind him getting the credit for it there. But it seems hard on certain people when it is regularly referred to in England as well. I often saw it set early in an innings before the war. Brown, who had said in his 1954 autobiography 1 that Bob Wyatt, Warwickshire’s captain from 1930 to 1937, was ‘an exponent’, wasn’t the only sceptic. 2 In an interview with this writer in 1996, Ken Meuleman, Carmody’s successor as Western Australia’s captain, claimed to have seen the umbrella field used years before in district cricket in Melbourne. Whatever the merits of the claims of Brown and Meuleman, it might seem that Carmody – with a first-class batting average just below 30 – was fortunate to have his name perpetuated by a decision to arrange eight catchers in an arc, with three on the leg side, around the wicketkeeper, an innovation arguably less fundamental to the game’s evolution than the previous five identified by The Cricketer : round-arm bowling; hitting to leg; over-arm bowling; close-up wicketkeeping; and googly bowling. 3 Yet the reverse is true. The constant linking of the Carmody name with the umbrella field has distracted attention from an even more significant, though 1 F.R.Brown, Cricket Musketeer , Nicholas Kaye, London, 1954, p 18. 2 However, Wyatt makes no reference to this type of field setting in his autobiography, Three Straight Sticks , published by Stanley Paul in 1951. 3 The introduction in 1957 of an experimental limit of two (eventually incorporated into the 1980 code of Laws) on the number of fielders permitted behind the wicket on the leg side made the umbrella more lop-sided.