EVOLUTION IN SPORT

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 155, 28 December 1935, Page 10

EVOLUTION IN SPORT

From time to time new rules and new codes for old games are proposed and debated with vigour. Probably there was heated controversy when William Webb Ellis in 1823 picked up a football at Rugby and ran with it, thus giving a definite beginning to what in the course of some thirty or forty years was to be evolved as a Rugby code. But nowadays the suggested variations are small—the scrum formation is a trifling change compared with the evolution of fifteen-a-side play from the fifty to a hundred in each team in the earliest "Bigside" games. Yet we have made great changes and others may make greater changes still. A Rhodesian missionary, Miss Mabel Shawi who has returned to England after many years in Africa, recently delighted a wide public by telling the British and Foreign Bible Society how Africa had improved football. Miss Shaw was not, of course, speaking of the "Springboks," but of natives in territories north of the Union. They began the game with readings of extracts from the Scriptures, and pointed comment by the captain on 'pressing on to the goal," and they played for five hours at a time with intervals of a quarter of an hour for general celebration whenever a goal was scored, players and spectators rejoicing together. All games ended in a draw, with a fine disregard for partisanship, and at the conclusion there was a hymn, usually and appropriately "Art Thou Weary, Art Thou Languid?" Commenting upon Miss Shaw's description of the African game, "The Times" found in it consolation for those people who sadly think that first-class cricket and football show marks of not improving with the years. We can take heart from the thought that there are plenty of places where these games are splendid novelties today. Africans and Asiatics and Central Americans can bring fresh minds to l.b.w. and off-side rules, and can adapt the raw material under the free play of their genius. They can return us games which we may not recognise but will certainly enjoy. It may sound like rank, heretical nonsense to suggest that anyone should take such liberties with cricket or football. But equally strange things have happened. Consider, for illustration, the undoubted traces of common ancestry in baseball and rounders, an example, if ever there were one, of the operation of a Darwinian system of evolution in sport.