Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

94 In 1945 and 1946 public question marks surrounded Bradman’s post-war playing future, but his unprecedented influence remained as a member of the Board of Control, chairman of national selectors and, if he so chose, captain of the Australian Test team. As early as 1945 a five-man WACA sub-committee invited him to Perth, paid for his accommodation and presented the case for admission. Bradman’s simple philosophy of support for any measure that would enhance Australian cricket was emphatic. Western Australia’s entry was consistent with that goal but couldn’t be at the expense – especially financial – of any other state. The WACA was given a two-year trial of half-time Shield status, playing each of the other states only once . These unique conditions would have presented a major obstacle to any coach. ‘Following the decision,’ wrote The Western Mail ’s Alex Barras in May 1947, ‘it was felt that a cricket coach was necessary if we were to retain our place after the two-year probationary period … the strongest possibility is that Keith Carmody, the New South Wales opening batsman, will be appointed’. He had good reason to praise the ‘dashing batsman with a full range of strokes whose method is to attack the bowling from the outset of the innings’. The second of two matches Barras had played for the RAAF in 1943 was against the South at Hove, when Carmody’s 137 in 90 minutes had aroused Sir Home Gordon’s ecstatic comparisons with ‘Hammond at his best’. In that game and the earlier one against Warner’s XI at Lord’s in June, Barras had seen enough to rate Carmody ‘a good player with an astute cricket brain’, who ‘would be extremely popular in this State’. Yet he felt that the appointment ‘will be received with mixed feelings’: although ‘fairly successful with his State’, Carmody had ‘practically no experience as a cricket coach’. The WACA evidently had more up- to-date intelligence. Unknown to Barras was Keith’s membership of a three-man Mosman coaching committee, alongside 1930s veterans Ken Gulliver and Gordon Horsfield, focused on young players. In 2010 John Hiscox, club historian and sometime president, remembered being taken by Carmody as a 12-year-old member of a team playing at Tantallon Oval, Lane Cove, immediately after the war. It’s even less likely that Barras would be aware of Keith’s devoted coaching of Peter Pearson in Stalag Luft III before the slow left- arm bowler headed Mosman’s 1946/47 first-grade averages and aggregate, with 39 wickets at under 20. This one aspect of Carmody’s credentials queried by Barras was to prove the source Achievement and Rejection in Western Australia