Sporting and Dramatic REVIEW AND Licensed Victuallers Gazette. With which is incorporated the Weekly Standard THURSDAY , AUGUST 27, 1903. THE FOOTBALL TEAM’S TOUR IN AUSTRALIA.
The tour of the team chosen to represent . the colony is over, and our men are once returning from the trip on Sunday last. They have distinguished themselves in a really remarkable manner, and it was small wonder therefore when the Union liner Mararoa came alongside the Queen street Wharf on Sunday the returning contingent were
received with the utmost enthusiasm by the large crowd who were there to meet them When the team was first selected it was generally regarded as a very powerful organisation, but the most sanguine believer in the prowess of the men can scarcely have anticipated such a veritable triumph throughout the tour. Much had been heard and read of the very marked improvement that had taken place in Rugby football in the two states of the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Queensland, for it must not be forgotten that in the other States the game is virtually non-existent. It must be freely admitted, however, that so far from the game having advanced in the States mentioned, it has, in fact, at most stood still, while retrogression would be perhaps a more apt definition. That this must be so seems evident from the phenomenal scoring put up by our representatives against the various teams selected to oppose them. The New Zealanders played ten matches, all of which they won, compiling 276 points, while only 13 points were scored against them. The tries numbered 63, while only two tries were obtained against them. The try-getters were Asher (17), D. McGregor (11), Wood (5), Lang (4), Kiernan (3), K. McGregor (3), Gallaher (3), Tyler (3), Wallace (2), Stalker (2), Nicholson (2), Spencer (2), Humphries, Given, McMinn, Stead, Armstrong, and Cooke (one each). The matches that may be claimed as tests were those against All Australia and the States of New South Wales and Queensland, in which the visitors scored 82 points, while only 3 points (a penalty goal in the Australian match) were scored against them, a clear indication of their vast superiority over the Australians.
The record achieved is distinctly superior to that of any other team which has represented the colony in Australia. In 1884 a team crossed the Tasman Sea, and won all their eight matches, scoring 167 points to 17. Nine years later another New Zealand fifteen played ten matches in Australia, losing one and winning nine, the points totalled being 163 to 44. The 1897 team also lost one match, and was victorious on nine occasions, scoring 229 to 73. The present was the first occasion on which a so-called combined Australian team —in reality New South Wales and Queensland —has played a match against our boys, but the result was a very easy victory for the wearers of the black and silver fern by 22 to 3. Referring to the tour the “Sydney Referee” says: —“The New Zealand team have completed their four representative matches against the State teams, with a result that leaves no possible shadow of doubt as to their superiority. In two matches they scored three tries and two penalty goals against New South Wales, and in two against Queensland they got 11 tries, four goals, and a field goal, neither of the opposition States scoring a point. These performances are little less than superb, and, though we in Australia feel sure that, through some inexplicable reasonj representative football form in the interstate as well as the New Zealand matches has fallen below that of the few preceding years, there can be no question about the great quality of the New Zealand combination ”
The succession of easy victories achieved makes it the more regrettable that when the Rev. Mollineaux’s team of English footballers ware out in Australia they were unable to pay a visit to this colony. Judged on performances—not always a safe thing to do in football—the New Zealand team must have decisively beaten the one from the Old Country. The latter lost three of the seven important matches played in Australia, and only scored between 60 and 70 points, while upwards of 50 points were scored against them. It seems therefore that, without undue boasting, we in New Zealand can still claim to hold the football supremacy of the colonies, being as far ahead of our Australian friends as they are superior to us at cricket. To the returned team who has so unmistakably demonstrated this fact, therefore nothing but warm praise is due, and it has been accorded them, not only by our own people but by all representative writers across “ the silver streak.”
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Bibliographic details
New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XII, Issue 703, 27 August 1903, Page 4
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784Sporting and Dramatic REVIEW AND Licensed Victuallers Gazette. With which is incorporated the Weekly Standard THURSDAY , AUGUST 27, 1903. THE FOOTBALL TEAM’S TOUR IN AUSTRALIA. New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XII, Issue 703, 27 August 1903, Page 4
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