Origin and history of the Carmody Field

Kane Williamson bowls to Monty Panesar on Day Five of the 3rd Test match between New Zealand and England at Eden Park on March 26, 2013 in Auckland, New Zealand © Getty Images

As Monty Panesar faced Kane Williamson and Trent Boult in the final overs in Auckland, nine men and the wicketkeeper huddled around him, lurking in wait for a snick. Arunabha Sengupta traces the origins of the Carmody Field.

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It was bit ironic that less than two days after Mahendra Singh Dhoni had talked about attacking fields being obsolete, Kane Williamson and Trent Boult bowled at the English tailenders with  nine men and the wicketkeeper forming a ring around the batsmen.

“The kind of cricket we play has entirely changed… The era of playing aggressive cricket and to have the mid-on up is gone,” the Indian captain had said after the conclusion of the fourth and final Test against Australia at Delhi.

And he had his reasons. It made a lot of sense in a normal match situation. What happened in Auckland was, however, as far from normal as possible.

By the time the last few overs were sent down, Brendon McCullum could not lose the match — but had perhaps already lost a lot of sleep over a delayed declaration. And when his masterstroke of introducing Kane Williamson was rewarded with the wickets of Stuart Broad and James Anderson, in came the fielders — each and every one of them — arranged in a crowd around Monty Panesar. It does the English left-arm spinner supreme credit to have managed a smile when surrounded and pressured by the Carmody Field.

The Carmody Field

Yes, when every fielder gathers around the bat, resembling a human parasol around the batsman, it is called an umbrella field or a Carmody Field.

One may encounter the occasional fusspot who will insist that the term can be used only when the fielders are arranged behind the wicket in an arc from leg gully to gully. Some may permit a short-leg, but never a silly mid-off. But, let us not quibble about such nitty-gritties.

The name for this kind of a field was lent by Keith Carmody, captain of Western Australia, the pioneering strategist who for the first time placed nine fielders near the bat. Doing this, Carmody joined the ranks of the greatest innovators of the game — alongside Nottinghamshire professional George Parr who started the unknown art of hitting to the leg; Australian wicketkeeper Jack Blackam, the first to stand up to the stumps; and Bernard Bosanquet, the first to break the ball from off to leg by releasing it from the back of his hand.

Carmody was originally from Sydney, having learnt the first lessons of batsmanship from the great Stan McCabe in the city’s Mosman Club. He made his debut for New South Wales as a blue-eyed 20-year old stroke-maker in the last season before the Second World War.

Drafted into service, he joined Royal Australian Air Force, flying Beaufighters from Langham, Norfolk, and playing for the RAAF cricket team.

In the summer of 1943, Ken Ridings was supposed to lead RAAF XI against Sir Pelham Warner’s XI at Lord’s. A few days before the scheduled encounter, Ridings was shot down by U-boats in the Atlantic.  As crowds gathered in huge numbers for the match, Flight Lieutenant Carmody led the RAAF side into the field. Entering Lord’s for the first time that day was a young Australian fighter pilot named Keith Miller.

Carmody himself was shot down off the coast of Holland in 1944, and spent two days in a rubber dinghy before being captured by a German U-boat. He spent the next months as a prisoner of war in Stalagluft 3, before being freed by the Russian Army in 1945. He went on to play three of the five outstanding encounters known as the Victory Tests, turning out for Lindsay Hasset’s Australian Servicemen against Wally Hammond’s England.

On their way home the Australian Servicemen played a number of matches in India, including a series of unofficial Tests. Camody scored 113 at Brabourne Stadium against an attack comprising of Vinoo Mankad, Lala Amarnath, CS Nayudu, Amir Elahi and Vijay Hazare.

After playing the 1946-47 season for New South Wales, he crossed to Western Australia and was appointed as captain-coach of the First-Class side as the state competed in the Sheffield Shield for the first time.

Carmody started his stint with a career-best 198 against South Australia. It was during this championship that he was frustrated by balls edged through the slips off his fast men Charlie Puckett and Kenneth Cumming. Carmody decided to counter it by placing his fielders in an arc of eight, from gully to leg gully. Soon, it bore fruit. In their very first appearance, Western Australia won the Sheffield Shield.

This arrangement of close catchers soon became known as the Carmody Field. Soon, Keith Miller started using the formation for New South Wales. In the summer of1953, Lindsay Hassett became the first international captain to use it in a Test match, when he arranged such a field for Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller against England.

Keith Carmody played First-Class cricket till 1956.

Since then the field has been used often enough, most famously in the seventies — by the West Indian pace attack and the fiery duo Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson against the Englishmen.

(Arunabha Sengupta is a cricket historian and Chief Cricket Writer at CricketCountry. He writes about the history and the romance of the game, punctuated often by opinions about modern day cricket, while his post-graduate degree in statistics peeps through in occasional analytical pieces. The author of three novels, he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/senantix)