WINTER IN THE OPEN

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21449, 15 April 1935, Page 9

WINTER IN THE OPEN

OLD GAMES BEGIN AGAIN SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN THE PARKS The coming of winter is by nature gradual, so that it is difficult to say —though it is said often enough—that winter is here on any particular day. All human efforts to regularise the seasons by fixing the opening dates for winter games 01 by adjusting the sun conveniently on a certain date do not seem to mark more clearly the borders of of the seasons. And so it is that while the first footballers are bruising themselves on grounds not yet softened by rain, the last are shortening their matches in the failing autumn light. Other games than cricket and football have their associations for many people of summer sun or keen, frosty air. But the seasons are typified better by those two than by any. Possibly it is because to nearly every schoolboy the long days bring cricket and the short days football, and because their fatheib have not forgotten. The shamefaced appearances 01 early footballers on warm autumn afternoons are now over and the game has begun in real earnest. Hockey is taking its share of the city's sports grounds and furthei afield the harriers are out. Golf is progressing sedately towards the season's full career, the courses have been carefully prepared, and the "nineteenth" has been duly stocked. So much for the recreation of those who stay in or near the city; but there are others who are waiting an opportunity for "winter sports proper, for ski-ing beneath the nearer mountains.

Lancaster Park The undemonstrative cricket crowds at Lancaster Park, taking their case "while the run-stealera dicker to and fro," have given place to a more noisy and anxious assembly. On Saturday afternoons in winter the park becomes an arena for contests of strength and cunning—a change from the academic graces of cricketers only a month or so ago. The familiar club jerseys emerge from the pavilion at the double, there is a short squeal the referee's whistle, and the old game begins again. Just enough frost in the air to tell slack muscles that they have been pampered long enough and to set them moving, it stiffly, as they should. White flannels are gone, whether for tennis or cricket; and whatever the game is that follows it is sure to be one which calls for an outfit more serviceable than beautiful. Like the far north, from whe—winter was supposed to come some of the old folk tales, the cold season is barbarous, concerned very little with spotlessness ■ of dress. There is, of course, the difference that mud is now spread as liberally over the field of play as blood used to be in the days when the score was counted in human lives. In the Evening: Probably the evenings after the day's play remain in memory longest. Winter evenings, when the mist begins to settle for the night among the netted branches of the trees—• there is more in these to remember than in the broad-day evenings of summer. On trams returning from the parks players and spectators mingle. Each tram has its attendant swarm of bicycles, some with sprigged boots dangling from the handlebars, others perhaps with a hockeystick along the bar. The raw cold seems to stir friendliness; when people are thinking, for example, of a fire, slippers and a newspaper at home, they are inclined to think well, too, of small sociabilities on the way.

The level green of the sports grounds in Hagley Park is losing its high surrounding wall of trees; soon there will be no more than a skeleton fence showing the frosty light or the grey threat of rain beyond. Football has come into its ov/n here, as elsewhere; but Lancaster Park is now the destination of the larger crowd on Saturday afternoons. Instead of the trees for horizon there is the stolid bulk of the gasometer, squatting behind the embankment; and instead of the comparative quiet of Hagley the noise from the railway yards nearby. The suggestion that these are more appropriate to football would probably be misinterpreted; but it is certain that anyone who has learnt either to watch or .to play the game in Christchurch will always find it has most appeal where there is a gasworks close by and suburban houses crowding round; especially when it is time to return in the evening.