Magnificent Mickey, 93, digs in for another day to cherish

MICKY Steele-Bodger is a name to conjure with, one of those you might find in a ‘Flashman’ novel.

What the 93-year-old former England flanker has done for Cambridge University rugby is also pretty flash, with the introduction of the annual match between a Steele-Bodger XV and the Light Blues as their dress rehearsal for the Varsity Match becoming an institution.

This Wednesday is the 70th anniversary of the Steele-Bodger match, and 4,000 fans are expected at Grange Road, with the venerable founder of the match – who has missed only two of them– present.

Steele-Bodger is one of the game’s great characters, and the determination and energy he showed as a small but effective flanker for England and Cambridge University – playing the 1945 and 1946 Varsity Matches and making his debut in the first postSecond World War international against Wales in 1947 – was mirrored in his drive as a rugby administrator (president of the RFU and the Barbarians).

One memorable SteelBodger anecdote concerns the 1947 Scotland match, when, as a vetinary student in Edinburgh he made a tortuous journey to the match at Twickenham, leaving on Thursday evening and arriving at 4am on Saturday due to heavy snowstorms.

Steele-Bodger was required to help dig the train out of ten foot snowdrifts in what he says was “Scott of the Antarctic territory”. Having got to the team hotel and fallen asleep, he left a message for a morning call, but woke to find the hotel deserted.

When he got to the ground and was told his place had been given to Vic Roberts, he remonstrated with the selectors. “I told them I hadn’t gone through those two days for damn all,” Steele-Bodger says. He was reinstated, with England winning 24-5. He recalls: “I had one of my better games. Having made such a fuss I thought I had better perform!”