PUBLIC BEHAVIOUR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23598, 7 September 1938, Page 8

PUBLIC BEHAVIOUR

It is safe to assert that the beerdrinking type of football spectator has, by his behaviour at recent Rugby games, in which the Ranfurly Shield was at stake, exhausted the patience of far more than those who have written to us to give public expression to their disapproval. The beginning of the evil is that the man who simultaneously satisfies a taste for beer and football is seldom alone in his excesses. Usually he has the company of others of his kind, and together they make public exhibitions of themselves while detracting from the comfort and enjoyment of the less exuberant people in their neighbourhood. Their comments on the ebb and flow of play, when not merely irritatingly stupid, are often offensive as to language in the ears of others. They represent, in brief, an element for the absence of which Carisbrook on a match day would be a pleasanter and altogether more wholesome place. There seems to be less reason for censuring the boys who seek to earn a welcome few pence by trading in the empty bottles that form part of the ground litter during and after a football match, though it may be thought that parents, if they took the trouble to investigate the circumstances of those juvenile activities, would seek to discourage them. There is, as a rule, little that is edifying in these occurrences, but the main problem is to discover a means of checking a practice that is threatening to get out of hand. It is scarcely possible to prevent people from drinking at a football match if they insist on doing so. But it ought to be possible to secure, for the benefit of the majority, a police surveillance that would have the effect of modifying the objectionable conduct of what is, after all, only a very small minority in a normal football crowd. Manifestations of bad taste in individuals seem, in these times, to be inseparable from sporting occasions on which people congregate in their thousands. It is a deplorable comment on present trends that such a spectacle as good Rugby provides cannot be briefly enjoyed for its own sake.