Valued Service To West Coast Rugby

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30155, 12 June 1963, Page 13

Valued Service To West Coast Rugby

’THE West Coast Rugby team which played Canterbury at Greymouth on the Queen's Birthday holiday must have missed the presence in jts pack of B.

L. Ross, who has retired from both club and representative football after a long and meritorious career. Ross was the strong, untiring type of forward whose contribution to the success of a team is often undervalued. His particular achievement was the ability to produce, season after season, games of consistently high standard for his club Excelsior (Hokitika), and his union.

There can be few players who have .appeared in 85 per cent, bf their union's representative fixtures over a span of nine years. Ross can claim such a record. He started his long association with the West Coast fifteen in 1954, as a hooker, then became a prop, a No. 8 and, in recent years, a flanker. Nothwithstanding West Coast’s modest representative programme, he contrived to play in 64 of the side’s matches: be missed only one engagement in 34 during the last four seasons.

If there is one particular match Ross remembers with pride it could be West CoastBuller’s game against the 1956 Springboks, in which he packed against the bruising P. S. du Toit. The home side was beaten, but Ross scored its only try—his first in representative Rugby.

Ross was a regular visitor to Lancaster Park Oval, playing in nine consecutive matches against Canterbury —three of them for the Ranfurly Shield. And, typically, there was not one bad game among them.