Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

26 at centre with Mike at fly half, but an injury shortly before the Varsity Match to the full back, Dennis Robinson from Rhodesia, prompted a reshuffling of roles. Johnstone chose to move himself to fly half and switch Mike to full back. ‘It didn’t work,’ Mike says rather sadly, reflecting on a 3-0 defeat against a side that had started the match as underdogs. For his final year at Oxford Mike shared digs with two of his fellow rugby Blues, Peter Robbins, who would later be best man at his wedding, and Roy Allaway, also a lifetime friend, who had been elected captain of the team. Allaway recalls that the digs in Stratford Street, a stone’s throw from the university ground at Iffley Road, were run by ‘Mrs Standing, who served us with the most magnificent breakfasts.’ She and her husband were delighted to have three Blues, including the captains of both cricket and rugby, living with them. Mr Standing was a shop steward at the Morris Car Works in Cowley and Allaway well remembers the discussions the three undergraduates had with him. ‘I learnt through our chats with Mr Standing that Mike’s socio-economic outlook was strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes and was anti what became the Milton Friedman credo of the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan eras. Mike believed that people of all races and creeds should be treated by the state as equals, given equal opportunity to receive a good education to ensure that talent surfaced regardless of personal wealth, and helped by the state in hard times.’ When his final year at Oxford began, though he shared lodgings with the Oxford captain, Mike had little idea how the Dark Blues were about to change time-honoured patterns of play or how he would soon become a household name as part of a half-back partnership that would revolutionise rugby and capture the imagination of public and press. In the 1950s rugby had become an attritional game with a premium on gaining territory through accurate kicking, one aspect of the game where Mike feels modern rugby is technically inferior. ‘Kicking out of the hand – they’re not doing it from school upwards, they’re not practising it. In the old days, if you couldn’t kick, you weren’t going very far as a fly half.’ But for spectators endless kicking had made rugby a less entertaining game, while three-quarter movements were too easily stifled by laws that permitted defending three-quarters to line up at set scrums level with the tunnel, a crucial couple of yards further upfield than is allowed today. Smith and Brace. For a brief while the two names had the sporting A cricketer’s hands on an oval ball