Career
He played for the British and Irish Lions on the 1971 tour to New Zealand, but was invalided out of the tour in Canterbury, after multiple punches by the opposition fractured his cheekbone. Richard Bath writes of him that he was:
"A solid scrummager, he was a superb minder at the line-out and surprisingly for a prop, was well known as a great cover tackler."
Allan Massie says that he was:
"..undoubtedly the fastest prop to have played for Scotland in modern times. Some critics felt that he was insufficiently assertive, but his side gained on balance from his concentration on ball and game, and his disinclination to be drawn into private battles.
His speed in the loose was made him seem more like a French forward than a British one, and it would have been a joy seeing him playing in a French-style pack."
Stephen Watt writes: Carmichael was an outstanding rugby player from an early age.
His versatility as a prop was because he played at Number. 8 for his school team (Loretto School, Musselburgh) where he was an early exponent of the "pick up and go" move from the base of the scrum.
Carmichael was part of the West of Scotland team in the 1970s - a powerhouse in United Kingdom rugby, averaging 10 internationalists in the team per season, and dominating the domestic league with West"s great rivals, Hawick Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Massie also says that for a prop, he was very versatile, and that in many ways, he presaged the move away from positional specialisation into a more diversified game. Carmichael is mainly remembered for being the victim of violence in the 1971 tour where he received five fractures of the cheekbone, yet still played until final whistle.
The match was described as an extremely violent match.
The referee at one point told the captains that from that moment onwards he was going to follow the ball and it was up to them to sort out anything else. Sandy Carmichael was replaced on the 1971 Lions tour by another Scottish prop, Ian McLauchlan (The Mighty Mouse) who proceeded to make the position his own. Carmichael also went on the 1974 tour to South Africa, but did not make the test side.