IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 187, 23 July 1932, Page 3 (Supplement)

IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

HAWTON'S PLAYING REPUTE IN QUEENSLAND ON THE WANE. Should Tom Lawton be captain of Australia’s Rugby Union team? Many Queenslanders will answer in the negative. They will go even further than .that, and say that he should not be included in the Queensland team. Tom Lawton is not a young man, as Representative footballers go, and the consensus of opinion in Brisbane is that ha should retire while retaining some of the form which made him a great player. In the last two seasons he has slowed down very much, and is not pearly the player he was.

More than that —he has shown a disinclination to train, a fault which was responsible for his exclusion from the Valley Club team not so long ago His answer to that was that he had taken other means of getting fit. His club expects him to be present at training, Bo that he can take his place in movements that are being developed. Lawton’s retention in the Queensland team seems to be due to the difficulty of finding a young player of sufficient ability to take his place. In choosing the Queensland team to meet the All Blacks at Brisbane, the selectors nearly provided a first-class sensation by omitting Lawton, though they knew that he had been chosen to lead Australia in the first Test. The man whom they intended to include so that they could reorganise the hack line without Lawton became unavailable owing to injury.