THE FAULT WITH CRICKET

Evening Post, Volume C, Issue 87, 9 October 1920, Page 4

THE FAULT WITH CRICKET

The revival of sport throughout the Empire has been one of the few bright spots in the rather dismal outlook since the war. The football season just over in New Zealand has shared to the full in that revival, and the prospects, apart from the question of modifying the rules and readjusting relationships witb the parent union, are fairer than for many a year. Can the same be said of cricket, which is about to commence its season? We regret to hazard a doubt. Cricket, for soma reason or other—and we may suggest reasons later—has never taken with the public here like football. Cricket is the national game of England, Australia, and South Africa; here it is but one of several summer pastimes. Football we take seriously—it is the New Zealander's "religion," declared a member of a distinguished visiting team from the Motherland years ago; cricket does not appeal to us in the same way. Yet cricket is one of the greatest of all games, with traditions running back over a century in the home of its birth, and with long and honourable record in the lands of its adoption in the Southern parts of the Empire. If sport is * true sweetener of a soured and sordid world, there is no better sphere for sportsmanship than cricket, the gentle manly game which has inspired poets and writers for generations. Why, then, in New Zealand, where we are nothing if not sportsmen, should football flourish and cricket merely 'stagnate? We have produced some of the greatest footballers in the world, and could hold our own at any time against the world's best players. In cricket we have no such record and no such claim. Why? Because in New Zealand football is the game of all and cricket the game of the few.

This would be a mere truism without further explanation. Football is the universal game not on its merits alone, but because it has been sedulously fostered and cultivated from the very start among the boyhood and youth of the country by the older men who have from time to time been entrusted with its management. We may have had occasion in the past to criticise the executive committees which have controlled Rugby for what we deemed to be errors, but we have never had to reproach, them with neglect of the sources of the representative football of the future. We wish we could say the same of tie gentlemen who aro elected to lookafifter the interests of cricket. Not. a few English cricketers have graduated from the modest obscurity of the village green to international fame at Lord's or the Oval. There axe Australians, too, who would confess to humble beginnings to a career of greatness with bat or ball. But, if the methods and policy of the Wellington Cricket Association, as exemplified by the discussion at Wednesday's meeting of the Management Committee, are a criterion of cricket control, then no such career open to native talent would appear to be possible here. Six clubs took part in the Wellington senior competitions last year. The committee had to consider ten entries for this season, including four clubs which desired promotion on more or less valid grounds. One had defeated all-comers in a junior competitior so easily as to create sarcastic comment; another ran teams most successfully from the lowest grade up to junior, where it lost its players; the third, representing the University College, promised an extra strong eleven if admitted to senior grade, and so forth. There is no need to go into names or details. The committee would not hear of ten senior teams; two members made a gallant fight for a compromise of eight—the original six and the best pair of the four aspirants for higher honours. That was lost. The number of teams in the competition was limited again to six. There was a further fight to find a place for at least one of the four outsiders as a substitute for the weakest of the six. That, too, failed, and the " Big Six " remain— the same old "six." The Chairman, a veteran cricketer, who still wields the willow, had not even faint praise for Wellington cricket and cricketers of today. Four senior clubs, he said, would be ample, let alone six. Hi 3 idea was that limitation of the number of clubs would sharpen competition, and thus raise the standard of cricket, just as, we presume, the very exclusiveifess of "high society" is said to nerve the social "climber" to keener effort. This is a I democratic country, and cricket, we believe, a democratic game, but this kind of theory would tend, we fear, to make of what we described as the " gentle manly " game of cricket merely a " gentlemanly " pastime. However, that can pass as a matter of opinion. The vital criticism of the methods of the^Vellington Cricket Association came from the lips of another veteran cricketer and member of the committee at the same meeting. He challenged anybody to name a dozen players in ten years who had made good from junior cricket. When one cornea to look at that both ways, Jurthw comment is «uperfiuou».