Visiting Cricketers.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 17990, 6 February 1924, Page 8

Visiting Cricketers.

In an interview in to-day's "Press," Mr J. S. Barrett, chairman of the New Zealand Cricket Council, suggests that the New South Wales cricket team may not have it all their own way in New Zealand. On paper, Mr Barrett admits, they are very formidable, but the excellent form shown by some of the provinces in the Plunket Shield matches is, he thinko, a reason for believing that New Zealand will do better than provide a few days' entertainment for the visitors. T7e hope Mr Barrett is- right, but he will be the first to agree, if ho is wrong, that it will make no difference to the pleasure with which the Australians will be received. The chief reason why it will be a pity if the gap between Australian and New Zealand form i 3 as wide as some supposo is that the Dominion, in those circumstances, will receive less benefit from tho matches than it would if the contests were keener. But whatever the

form of one side or the other, the result Trill be a real fillip to the game all over the Dominion. Students or the philosophy of game 3 could no doubt advance reasons why New Zealanders, who have conquered the •world in football, have not yet conquered the smallest corner of the English- speaking world with a cricket bat. There is our climate to be reckoned with, in the first place, though it is a far better cricketers' climate than England's. There are oar youth (as a community), our lack of leisure, our small numbers, our peculiar distribution. Above all these, there is our isolation, and if we leave the more subtle causes to the philosophers, we have an urgent reason here for as many visits from, the i players of other lands as the foreseeing j can arrange for us. New Zealanders are not dull or slow or unsportsmanlike or temperamentally disinclined to games in which skill is more important than strength, nerve than blind dash, and conscience than cunning. Except for tho disadvantages we have mentioned, they have everything that makes for first-class cricket but firstclass cricketers. It is a fact, too, and from the standpoint of cricket a most unfortunate fact, that much of our best material tends to specialise in tennis and golf. It would not be difficult to name men who have become champions with racquet and club who would, if they had stuck to the bat, have achieved an oven .greater preeminence. But in Bport, of courso, there can be no repining. Cricket does not grudge golf and tennis their gains: it laments only its own lack of the opportunity to attain excellence. It welcomes the players of Now South Wales because they are such players as New Zealand seldom sees, because they come from a country in which cricketers are almost the - only approach to an order of chivalry, and because nothing is better for any country than that its sportsmen should be the hosts of other sportsmen come to dish them like gentlemen.