RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29509, 10 May 1961, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

SPORTING INJURIES

Followers of Rugby, perhaps even including a few of the players, may have been incensed by recent medical comments about the avoiding of football injuries. It was reported that almost every Saturday afternoon, much valuable time was taken up attending to fractured bones and other injuries sustained by footballers, and the suggestion was made and printed (which proves that the newspapers will print anything even when it is against the national interest) that games might be postponed when the ground is rock hard. Any spectator who has stood on the bank at Lancaster Park will say that it is far more enjoyable when there is firm footing than when it is muddy, and since there are far more

spectators than players, the majority must rule. It is to be hoped that reoorts of these comments were not published overseas. Enough publicity has been caused in the past by footballers wearing protective harness beneath their jerseys without any further hints of New Zealand Rugby men going soft on the game. The trouble is that many New Zealanders, especially women, do not understand the finer points of Rugby. Perhaps when a TV camera with , a telescopic lens can fothis right into a scrum there will be a "loser appreciation of the really fine points of the game. Some of those scrums in the Springbok series plight have been made 'into a full-length film if they had been so covered. Besides. other sports can be equally dan-

gerous. Obviously the critics of Rugby have never played a card game like forty-fives, or been tapped smartly on the ankle in a croquet game. Perhaps the worst sporting hazard oX all is the risk that so many take at the racecourse of naving their fingers jammed or broken just when they were going up to the totalisator to put a fiver straight-out on the nose of an outsider that paid £57 15s. It seems to happen to scores of people, from what you can hear, and yet you don't hear them complaining that totalisator windows ought to be made of nonharmful plastic which would jam nobody. Rugby postponements because of nard grounds would be against the national interest, and there are thousands of spectators on the bank to back these words.