SCOTTISH RUGBY UNION

Evening Star, Issue 20049, 14 December 1928, Page 15

SCOTTISH RUGBY UNION

hmm TOWARDS QOffilttiGHS SI6HS 0F COMING FRiEKDSKfP South Africa and Now Zealand have been contesting what they arc pleased to term the Rugby championship of the world. Who can say them nay? The Now Zealanders, not so long ago, wiped the floor with England, Wales, and Ireland. Scotland escaped because they had no match for us (writes “ Diogenes,” in the Edinburgh ‘Evening News ’). South Africa had a merry time here before the war; wo fared rather badly in South Africa after the war. The dominions are going to “ force the hand of the English Union.” Which hand; the open hand we have always been persuaded the English Union held out overseas, or the hand tied behind the English back by Scotland and, in lesser degree, by Ireland? One of these days there will be a change in the attitude of the Scottish Union, not towards the game as an article of home consumption, but towards the dominions. Scotland cannot always he, or appear to be, antagonistic, even to New Zealand. Some day it will occur to the Scottish .Rugby Union that it is a matter of legitimate pride that, while the greater part of the Continent of Europe and the Latin Americans have taken Soccer to their hearts, and while that branch of the game is going—so optimists over there tell us—to sweep the United States and Canada, South Africa and New Zealand and New South Wales have made Rugby their national game. Association football is being played in South Africa and New Zealand more and more. So I gather from papers

sent mo from time to time. But even newspaper “space” tells its story. Rugby is the game of the dominions. The Rugby League is nursing Australia and New Zealand. What if aloofness on the part of the home unions drove the dominions into the arras of the professional game? As somebody, or other’s “ memorial,” where would j Twickenham or Murrayfield bf thwtf, (