BATTLING RUGBY TOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 127, 26 November 1945, Page 6

BATTLING RUGBY TOUR

Followers of Rugby football know well that the score is not always an accurate index or reflection of the game. The New Zealand Army team touring Britain beat England at Twickenham on Saturday by 18 points to 3, which looks like an easy victory on the score, but which, in fact, by all accounts, it distinctly was not. It was a lively, fast, exciting game, in which the New Zealanders had most of the luck. As the Press Association cable puts it, confirming the impression of the broadcast running description of the match, "luck and much individual ability among the backs and some forwards . . . gave the New Zealanders the victory, but the young and inexperienced Englishmen in some respects deserved better fortune. Their backs came up more swiftly to the defence and tackled ■effectively, and the forwards. broke up and rallied more smartly. . . . Only in occasional bursts did the New Zealanders give a glimpse of the form necessary to carry them through the severer tests ahead, notably against Cardiff and Wales." Now this may be true enough, but the use of the word "tests" may convey the impression that this is an All Black tour, and that the Army team is fully representative of New Zealand Rugby. No such claim has been, or can be, made. On the other hand, the fact that the people of the British Isles are emerging from the much severer test of six years of war in the front line, and that large British forces, with their quota of young manhood, are still overseas, should about equalise matters. Again, a touring team has the great advantage of playing together, match after match, and so gaining combination in teamwork, whereas even international sides in their own countries have seldom the opportunity of practice and training together and knowing each other's play. Against that, injuries are more serious in the limited membership of a tourmg team. All in all, therefore, the conditions should make for good, free, friendly Rugby, the natural game in the country of its origin, where it has never developed, through scientific study, to the point it reached here in the days of the old original All Blacks, j forty years ago. But what the New Zealand Army team, touring Britain today, probably possesses to a superior degree is that extra quickness off the mark which many observers noted as a characteristic of the New Zealand Division with the Bth Army, a quality calculated to lead to victory against odds in the field of sport as in the field of battle.