Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

29 speaking of his half-back partner, ‘you couldn’t wish for better. Mike fell into the spirit of playing this kind of game. Here was a rugby player with a cricketer’s hands. And he could motor, really quick, like his running between the wickets!’ Add in his skilful kicking, his eye for an opening and his quick mind, and Mike, in Brace’s view, could have had as distinguished a career at rugby as he achieved at cricket, though he remains amazed that a man so dependent on spectacles managed to cope without them. ‘A lot of people don’t realise how bad his eyesight was,’ he says. The game in those days was also less confrontationally physical, Mike feels. ‘If I played today, without a shadow of a doubt I would need to be at least a stone and a half heavier.’ David Brace, a real lightweight, concurs. ‘Don’t you bother to tackle or fall on the ball,’ his coach had told him. ‘That’s what the back-row forwards are for!’ Though Brace describes modern kicking as ‘aerial ping- pong’, Mike believes that law changes have greatly improved the game. Now there may be less need of an Onllwyn Brace, but when he and Mike teamed up in 1955 their partnership was a breath of fresh air in a stereotyped game. ‘It was great to play in,’ Mike recalls, ‘because it was open. The press took to it and we certainly won most of our matches. I remember going down to Cardiff and winning, for example.’ ‘We were the first professionals,’ says Brace, not suggesting that he and his colleagues lined their pockets from the game, but reflecting on a life where the team trained together every day, played matches twice a week and would still be plotting moves with the salt and pepper pots over dinner in the evening. Signals were planned for moves. At the line-outs, for instance, the positioning of Brace’s feet indicated to which member of the team the ball should be thrown. It was a stratagem he later tried to introduce to the Wales team, but international rugby was not yet ready for such subtleties. ‘I decide where I’m going to throw it,’ he was firmly told by Ken Jones, holder of 44 caps. Oxford went to Twickenham clear favourites and this time they did not disappoint, winning a closely fought match against a strong Cambridge side by nine points to five. Reporting on the match, E.W. Swanton in the Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘But if one man more than another was the match winner, I take him to be Smith. He caught everything flung at him at whatever range and angle, backed up not only by Brace but whoever had the ball with the surest instinct for position, and was equally much on hand in defence. His kicking sent back the Cambridge forwards 40 yards A cricketer’s hands on an oval ball