ASHES CHANGE HANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 17 February 1933, Page 6

ASHES CHANGE HANDS.

The fourth Test has come and gone, and with it the Ashes. Public excitement in both Australia and England has been at fever heat- for months, and the reaction, when it was realised at the close of Wednesday’s play that Australia was in a hopeless position, was apparent in the handful of spectators that witnessed the closing stages of the game at Brisbane yesterday. After the jubilation has died down in England, and the first sharp pangs of defeat in Australia have been dulled by the passage of time, people will be able to review thg tour with more or less dispassionate judgment. It Will be surprising if they can gain much satisfaction by so doing, for seldom in the history of this great intematlbnal contest has there been such wrangling and recrimination, such ill-feeling and lack of restraint, such loss of perspective in the turbulence of the moment. In the first place the M.C.C. team is to be sincerely congratulated on avenging the severe defeats recently inflicted on it by Woodfull and his men. England strained every nerve to win the rubber this year, aird the will to win at almost any cost was personified in the leadership of the team. Perhaps that was where the trouble began, for there were several “incidents” on the tour in which, to the distant onlooker at any rate, greater tact might well have been shown. The ludicrous extent to which the bodyline howling controversy was carried is too well known to be recapitulated. Doubtless the Australian crowds were not as strictly impartial as they might have been, for defeat after victory is always a difficult pill to swallow. To cut a long story short, the great mass of the people became so engrossed in the prize that they almost lost sight of the game, and some of the proudest traditions of cricket went by the board. Today England holds the Ashes once again, but what are they worth, when so much that is good in cricket has been sacrificed in the battle? Many people, no doubt, would gladly see the Ashes tossed to the four winds. Yet this seems hardly necessary. Perhaps the lesson has now been learned, and in the remaining

matches of the tour there will return a saner outlook. With the exercise in the future of truer sportsmanship by everyone concerned “The Ashes may yet regain the prestige they have lost as a trophy of honour in one of the world’s greatest sports.