THE NEW ZEALAND CRICKET TEAM.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20022, 12 February 1927, Page 10

THE NEW ZEALAND CRICKET TEAM.

The hopes which have been excited by the project, about to be realised, to send a New Zealand cricket team to Great Britain, to measure its strength with county teams and other important elevens are plainly mingled with feelings of disappointment concerning the composition of the team now that it is chosen. The team is not so strong as at the beginning of the season it was anticipated it would be. Whether it is as strong as it might be is a question concerning which there will be a great difference of expert opinion. The probability is that, as a combination, the team is very little, if at all, superior to the best team that could be chosen from the cricketers who are being left behind in New Zealand, and in that event there must be ground for believing that some of the selected players have been fortunate in securing their places. It is to be regretted that the weakness of the bowling in New Zealand is notorious. The scoring in the Plunket Shield matches this season has sufficiently demonstrated this fact. The selectors of the team have made a somewhat despairing attempt to strengthen its powers of attack by the inclusion of W. E. Merritt, of Canterbury, almost solely on the strer jth of his successful bowling at Carisbrook in the past week against a set of .singularly unenterprising batsmen. The selection of Merritt, a youth who left school only a few weeks ago, is a daring experiment, and it is to be hoped that it will be justified by results. But it is not slow bowlers that the team needs so much as fast bowlers, its weakness in this respect being illustrated by the selection of W. Cunningham, of Canterbury, and M. Handervon, of WplPugtcn—neither of

them really fast and both very or&nmy bowlers. He is a very optimistic New Zealander who imagines that the team from the Dominion will, with th« bowling it commands, dismiss county elevens like those of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Surrey, and Middlesex for moderate totals. The New Zealand team requires considerable batting strength to compensate for what seems to be its bowling deficiencies, and, though it is not as powerful as it might be, it should be able to make a lot of runs on favourable wickets. Doubts have been expressed concerning the wisdom of the selectors in picking certain batsmen and in exoluding others, but if there are blemishes in the selectors' work, one of the most serious of them consists in the inclusion of F. T. Badcock, the imported coach at Wellington, since he is neither a New Zealander nor on amateur, and surely the intention of the Cricket Council, in deciding upon the tour, was that the team should bo entirely composed of amateur cricketers. The best wishes of New Zealand people, however, will accompany the team. If it does not win most of its matches, it should, at any rate, win the respect of the British public by its sportsmanship, and the members of the team and, through them, New Zealand cricket should benefit considerably by the experiences of the tour.