At 37, Tom Smith is the Premiership's oldest player. As the prop bows out, he tells Chris Hewett in The Independent about living with epilepsy, and how to win on Lions tours.
"Even now, a dozen years on from the famous Lions victories in Cape Town and Durban, no one quite knows how Tom Smith – all 5ft 10in and 16st of him – brought to heel a Springbok front row that unleashed such hounds of hell as Os du Randt and Adrian Garvey. But then, what does anyone know of Tom Smith? How is it that this most singular of Londoners became the cornerstone of the last truly successful Scotland pack? What is the nature of the inner strength that allowed him to play rugby at the highest level in grim defiance of his epilepsy? Above all, how in God's name has he kept going so long?
"That last one is easy to answer," he said this week at Franklin's Gardens, where, if things work out as planned, he will play one last home game for Northampton – against Saracens in the semi-final of the European Challenge Cup next Friday night – after eight years of unstinting service. "The core skills of the prop forward do not include pace, which is the first thing a sportsman loses as he grows older. Some would argue that they don't include mental forethought either, so there's another bonus. In my position, you need brute strength and a highly-developed survival instinct. Those are things that don't disappear with youth."
RSS feed
