FOOTBALL.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XV, Issue 886, 28 February 1907, Page 11

FOOTBALL.

The South Africans have been praised on all sides in the English press on account of the fairness of their play (says the “ Referee.”) In innumerable instances writers infer that the New Zealanders were not so fair in their methods and not such good sportsmen. Even writers who had nothing but the most complimentary references to make of the New Zealanders while the latter were in the Old Country have become infected. Some of the writers are manifestly prejudiced, and have viewed things with a powerful magnifying glass. Our New Zealand football friends are well able to look after themselves on or off the field. At the same time they will be well advised to be scrupulously careful in the future in the matter of illegal interference, in order to prove to the onlooking myriads that they are not justly open to the criticism to which they have been subjected.

Of the South African, “ Judex,” in the London “Sportsman”: —“If they have taught us nothing else the one great lesson of the tour would in itself justify the undertaking, provided always we are neither too dull nor too insularly self-sufficient to profit by example. They have shown us that the playing of Rugby football in its most up-to-date, bright, open, and attractive form need not entail the least degree of unfairness • in any of its many forms, and that pace, pluck, and resolution are qualities which make the road to success even broader and

smoother than low cunning, unconscionable cleverness, and those studied methods and movements necessitating some subtle breach of the rules or violation of their spirit which have placed some successful sides of the past in an unmerited niche of the temple of footer fame.” .