ENGLAND AND CRICKET

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21470, 19 April 1933, Page 9

ENGLAND AND CRICKET

AN AMERICAN TRIBUTE " PERFECT SPORTSMANSHIP " [from Ol'lt OWN COnnKSI'ONDKNT] NEW YORK. March 1G "In baseball you may not Only nccuso an opposing team of manlike' conduct; you may go further, mid accuse it, man by man, of every crime in the calendar, reinforcing your remarks with all the thing bottles that you can lay your hands oil," writes Clair Price, London representative of the New York Times, in paying cricket probably the greatest tribute ever punted in any non-British publication. "How different in cricket." ho adds. "The members of an JNI.C.C. test match team are no ordinary ilesh and blood, as arc the members of a 'World Series' baseball team. They are patterns of perfect, sportsmanship, exemplars of the English gospel of fair play.. "Successive Imperial Conferences arc apt to produce an erroneous impression as to the nature of the forces which give the self-goyerning Dominions such diverso and scattered unity as they have. We are apt to think of their Miity as political or economic, and no doubt in part it is. But there is nilother .Imperial cement, which is more unobtrusive than either politics or economics. "No separatist ever plays cricket. In Iced, there would certainly have hi«oii no Irish problem if the Irish had been induced , to learn the groat national sport of the English. And it may be tiiat Canada and Newfoundland are sometimes regarded as delicate parts of the Imperial structure only because neither of them plays test match cricket. "It may be cricket which has produced English ritualism; it is certainly ritualism which has produced the most famous of all national types, that of the English gentleman. It need not necessarily follow that, for ordinary mundane purposes, the English gentleman is either bettor or worse adapted than the upper-class Frenchman or German or American; but, if you regard him purely as an attempt to solve the problem of the innumerable petty. roughnesses of normal human intercourse, you will find that the cotton-wool wrappings of good form and ritual make the English gentleman very nearly a perfect success. And Lord's is his spiritual home."