The Spanish Spirit In Rugby.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20091, 21 November 1930, Page 10

The Spanish Spirit In Rugby.

' It might have been thought that the news from Sydney a day or two ago, that a French Rugby football team might visit Australia and New Zealand in 1932, would be received with all the pleasure of anticipation. It seems to have been received with doubts and misgivings. Crowds would go to see the Frenchmen play; but what would the crowds do after the Frenchmen had played their last game? They might stay away from the club and provincial games, as they .did after the British Rugby visit had lic interest is so like a child's balloon, which bursts when it has> swelled to the most gratifying bigness, those who govern Rugby have an anxious problem to think about. They must quicken enthusiasm for Rugby; and the best means of quickening it is the surest to kill it. That, of course, is like the saying of a man who wasted his time in making epigrams instead of playing football—" If you want to keep any- " thing alive," he said, " you have to " organise it; and as soon as you "organise it, it is dead." The truth is not caught in such knots. Indeed, epigrams are only ingenious lies that draw attention to simple facts; and the simple fact about football is that the best can be overvalued. Football is so very much more important than international football that it would almost be better to play no international games at all than to find ordinary ones flavourless after them. New Zealand does not yet need to re("rture from Spain the tirel.ss interest in football which needs no stimulus from Test matches; but it is there. It lasts through a season nine mcnths long, according to a writer in the New Statesman. It supports over 700 elubs. and it takes 60,000 people to Barcelona to see the Cup Final. But football thrives, not because crowds look on, but because the masses play it. In Granada, in a small square, the traveller found the youny men, still dressed for work, playing football, while old women watched from their doorways and the " wiseacres on the "church steps nodded their heads in " profound commentary on every move "in the game." In the palace-monas-tery of the Escorial, where the Kings of Spain lie in the vaults below, " at ' half-past twelve every morning the " wide flagged spaces are suddenly " filled with schoolboys kicking foot- " balls"; and they kick well. All over Spain, in the parks, in the market places, on the beaches, they play football: if 4 tot with a football, then with a tennis-ball or " a heavy mass of paper " bound up with string." This intercjsi is the growth of twenty or thirty years It will be a pity if, in another twenty or thirty, the Spaniards learn so much about the game as ti> lose their pleasure in all but international champions.