CHARGES DENIED

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 73, 23 September 1930, Page 9

CHARGES DENIED

(From "The Post's" Representative.) / SYDNEY, 18th'.September; No sooner-had-'-the-'British Bugby team, left Sydney than statements were published containing Bensational allegations about the conduct of its members during their stay in Sydney. These hav-e been indignantly denied. .The tourists wore reported to have given Sydney a "great exhibition of larrikinism, of .sinking, enough boose to flood the Thames, behaving in a local hotel like a lot of boorish boys, and doing everything thoroughly biit play football." Such criticism was in bad taste to say the least of it. They were also criminally libellous if the opinion of people who should know counts for anything. ■■~..; v ■ It is admitted that the team auffereS, its greatest defeat when it played its last match in Sydney last Wednesi day. Obviously it was out of form, butj it was not reasonable to ; expect that the members would be keyed up after the strenuous season they had had in | Now Zealand. They hau showed the public that they were ■ vastly superior to New South Wales when they were at the top of their form, and they can hardly bo blamed for taking it easy during the last week of what had been a long and difficult tour. Whon the manager of the team, Mr. J James Baxter, was asked in Melbourne.; to reply to the allegations, lie to inclined to treat t'*c matter with the contempt that it deserved. "I think the authorities in Sydney.: will.mate) un offoctive reply to such statements," he said. "It is such a contemptible thing to make accusations of that nature that I will, for the present at any rate, take no notice of them." Mr. Gordon Shaw, manager of the Waratahs when they Houred England, stayed with the British team during its tour of Now South Wales and Queensland, and he strongly denied the statements. "Anyone who has had the pleasure of the British team's company knows what gcntlemon thoy all are," he said. "For proof it is not necessary to go further than the Hotel Australia. The staff there thinks the world of them. And if the reported acts of lar-< rikinism were true, guests would most certainly have complained to the manager. Complaints have not even been hinted at. A more petty attempt to belittle a band of athletes who have played a game as it should be played, who, as sportsmen -have lived rip to the highest traditions, and have endeared themselves to tho sportsmen of two countries, Australia and New, Zealand, it would bo difficult to imagine."