TOPSY-TURVYDOM.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 July 1929, Page 5

TOPSY-TURVYDOM.

Some gallant fights and some fine golf shots are provided by these forlorn hopes. We saw them at Leeds in the Ryder Cup contest. But it would surely be much more appropriate if the admittedly best players of the sides—-“the captains and the kings”—were engaged in the life-and-death throes.

/ They are presumably the more accusI tomed and the better, adapted to meet the exigencies of a crisis; at any rate, it seems wrong that, having finished their own fight, they can do nothing but watch when the finish comes. They ought, for the sake of sentiment, to be in°the thick of the battle. That. situation would shape itself if the order of starting were arranged so that the last choices went our first, and the players appointed as the best went out last. It would make the important personages (and therefore the camp followers) very late for lunch; but what is lunch compared with an ideal finish? Another point concerns the order of placing the players. Each captain gives in his order in a sealed envelope, and the individual matches are constituted accordingly. But it occurs sometimes that one captain thinks he has thrown away sure winners on certain losers in the other team —not that the other captain has deliberately sacrificed his weak men in strong places, but that .he has too much faith that they will rise to a big occasion. It has been suggested that all the members of each team should vote on their order of play. Why not draw, for it? The Oxford and Cambridge Society draw for their order of play when they trained their first victory over their favourite enemies, the Royal Liverpool Club. Mr. H. D. Gillies happened to come first out of the hat, and he beat the then wondrous Mr. John Ball.