Untitled

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 7954, 6 July 1897, Page 3

Tho Melbourne public arc waning in their devotion to football, writes a corrcsjiondeit. The one public sport they love with a love that never grows cold is horse-racing. Cricket only draws when it is international : Saturday afternoon matches in the summer are played to empty benches. These lust two winters football draws smaller and smaller crowds. Lacrosse is coming ,t little, but only a little. Baseball is dead, or nearly dead. A few fellows chase paper pellets across country and call themselves harriers, but there is no fun to the public in that singular form of sport. The cause of the lessened attendance at football is the bicycle. The young fellows— and old fellows too— who ride the bicycle in Melbourne are to lie numbered by thousands. Instead of spending Saturday afternoon at si football match, they all go riding round the suburbs or out into the country. The clerks in the banks, tho wool warehouses, the merchants' olliues, are all bicyclists ; or if they are not their chums are, and their parties of football barrackers are dispersed. Even in the iron foundries many men are cyclists, and so ure the compositors in the newspaper nlliccs. Football consequently millers ;i.s regards at endances.