NEW ZEALAND FOOTBALLERS

Gisborne Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1625, 13 December 1905, Page 1

NEW ZEALAND FOOTBALLERS

A DELIGHTFUL PARODY ON THE NEW ZEALAND FIFTEEN.

Under this heading the World pub

liskes a delightful parody on Mr Harold Begbie’s stylo of ‘^journalese.” It is given “ With acknowledgements to Mr Harold Begbie’s articlo, when it appears on the New Zealand Fifteen,” and runs as follows : “ The field lies green and grim between its whitewash ribands. Here and there gaunt brown patches stare gloomily at the skies, marking, as blood pools mark a sterner battleground, the sites of pitched encounters, desperate melees, impetuous assault and swift repulse; skulls, urged by impatient feet, driving against skulls

—brute force pitted against brute force in the stern arbitrament of the scrum.

Above, a leaden sky ; below, around, a broad blotch of bowlertopped, pale faces. Here, as in so many crowds, you see all classes of men—parsons and punt-poll makers, merchants and mechanics. But a type predominates—clean-shaved, pleasantvoiced, straight-backed, with keen faces and knobby, nervous hands. These are Rugby players—public school and ’Varsity men all of thorn. Harder knocks are to be won in tho handling game than under the sister code, and in our gentle-blooded youth still lingers tho passion for blows and buffets learnt by their sires in tho jousts.

“ A thin, pea-fed whistle bites the ear. Across the ground whips a sudden hush, blanketing the murmuring crowd, and 15 men, the country’s pride

—these stream on to tho arena. A fou-do-joie of cheers greets them, drops, and bursts aloft again as the pavilion door yields a black smudge of men rapidly melting into the component parts of tho New Zealand Football Fifteen.

“ Watching their mien as they' pass silently and with daring originality to positions unknown in the English game, the mind swings back to Nero. The green turf fades from view, the sawdust-strewn arena leaps to the eye, and one sees the stark gladiators, snatched from Nubia and Gaul, filing before the Emperor. Mighty of stature, proud of tread, calm of brow, eaters of death scorning to bite on defeat—thus were Nome’s gladiators, and thus to-day are their prototypes, the swift and silent.

But again the tympanic membrane trembles before the waves of whistling sound. A black marble statue of an athlete—no, it is a New Zealander—takes five nervous paces, and up, up like a bird—up, up and forward like a winged hound deftly slipped, speeds the urgent bladder. “Poised beneath it, arms flung aloft, bared head thrown backwards, as who should invoke a descending spirit, stands an English tlireequarterback. Safely he clasps it to his garishly striped breast, and now, in any other match would run and strongly speed it touchwards with his foot. But hardly had he felt the ball, when like hounds on their quarry, the horrid, sombre pack from New Zealand bursts upon him. “ One giant locks twin arms about his waist; thrice are his legs encircled, twice his thighs ; he is crashed to earth, the shining hide slips from his grasp, brown arms pendant from blackjersey ed arms seize it, from compatriot it flies, and like a great black wave at for any other seaside holiday j resort) the swift and silent colonials speed onward. They are within a yard of the goal-line - their opponents fluug so lightly aside that the air and the I ground are flecked with white forms as with paper in a school pa^er-chaso when, checked by a forward pass, a I scrum is rendered essential. I “ Black interlocks with blade, white with white ; into the grotto of fact e, I figures, and feet, the bruisod toy .s

unerringly dropped, and, .with straining muscles, the human nut-crackir closes on its victim. Outside the fleet , fractious await tho advent of tho ker- ' nal. But every eyo is on tho notorious I wing forward. At a glance one secs there is full reason for the controversy which has ragod about this unique and enigmatic player—that ho is either offside or onsido a child might discern. Hopping hero, peering there, he is to me a Mephistopheles socking a weak point in someliydra-lieaded, contiped. d | being through which lio may snatch | out the soul and secure it for his own. Another second and he has dono so ; the white-clad ministers arrayed against him desperately endeavor, to regain it, a quick feint on this side and on that, and with a ghoulish laugh ho ha 3 plunged over the line. “ So the game gees on. I como away wondering on many things.”