His Last International

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 6864, 21 May 1932, Page 11

His Last International

BASSETT’S MEDIOCRE GAME AGAINST IRELAND Before Wales’s recent Rugby match with Ireland, Jack Bassett, the Welsh full-back and captain, and full-back of the British team in New Zealand and Australia in 1930, intimated that it would be his last international game, as he intended to retire at the end of the season. It was all the more regretted, tlieq, that he ended his international carder with a display well below his old standard. “It seemed to me,” says a writer in an English paper, “that Bassett lost confidence after

allowing Ireland to score the first try. He was never himself after that.” Another writer says: “Even during the earliest part of the present season it was whispered that Jack had become very slow. This had become obvious, but before the match with Ireland his wonderful sense of anticipation enabled him to make up for his loss of speed. Qn this occasion, however, Bassett started ‘off the wrong foot’ and was never his usual cool and certain self.” However, Police-Sergeant Bassett is remembered as a man who had given some magnificent displays as fullback for Wales. Flat-Racing And The Slump Surveying the prospects for the new season of flat-racing in England, the “Daily Mail’s” principal racing writer said, recently: “Hard times may mean less betting, smaller attendances at racemeetings, and fewer horses in training, but they have not lessened the popular interest in racing which is the steady growth of 300 years. And I firmly, believe that the depressed conditions from which the sport could not escape last year are passing ... In spite of all that has happened, there are at this moment 1200 horses in training at Newmarket alone, each costing approximately £4OO per annum to train and race. This is 100 fewer than was the total 12 months ago, but it greatly exceeds the yearly pre-war average.