The Globe. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1875.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 399, 22 September 1875, Page 2

The Globe. WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1875.

We shall be very glad to welcome the Auckland team of football players on their return from Dunedin, and, though we must of course hope for a victory for the Canterbury representatives, yet we trust the match will be a well-con-tested and fairly equal conflict. It must be a source of astonishment to many of our patrons of athletic games that Auckland appears to be the only proviuce which sends forth wandering teams, seeking victory far away from home. The successful trip of the Auckland cricketers will be remembered for some years, and though the football representatives of the same province have not made such a conquering career, yet, the love of manly games which has prompted them to travel from one end of New Zealand to the other, is as commendable in their case as in that of their more fortunate exponents of the fellow English game. Football probably has not as many devotees as cricket, and the difficulty of getting together the requisite number of players to represent any province, and to undergo the discomforts of a voyage round the New Zealand coast, must naturally be greater than in obtaining a cricketing eleven having the same object in view. That devotion to an athletic pastime which induces a man to leave his home and business for a considerable time, and to take the chances of sea-sickness, with all its attendant horrors, merely for the sake of forming one of a number of gentlemen who are to endeavour to kick a ball past a certain spot, is purely and entirely English. We are not venturing upon the debateable ground as to whether the present craze for athletism is, or is not, inducing these public trials of skill and strength to be carried on to an undue extent. This question has been argued by far abler exponents of their different views than we can pretend to be of our own. But it must be conceded that their is something almost heroic in the youth who will travel a thousand miles or so, for some half-dozen chances of exhibiting his skill at a roughish game, with the chance of a sprained ankle and a broken collar-bone thrown in to make the trip more attractive. The dwellers in Auckland appear to have had very little difficulty in selecting, from a number of aspirants, a team every member of which is willing to undergo all the chances we have mentioned. We doubt if the same could be said of Canterbury, and in reality there can be no disguising the fact that the visit of the Aucklanders is not likely to be returned by a Canterbury team. Sundry unpleasant, and, to our thinking, totally unjustifiable remarks, were made in some of the Auckland papers, with regard to the fact that no Southern eleven had gone up to Auckland to try and wrest from them the laurels won by the travelling cricket team from that province. We have before explained that, as far as Canterbury was concerned, it was distinctly undorstood by our opponents that no such effort would be made. We think it as well, before the present football match is played, that there should be an equally clear understanding, one way or the other. If the football interest in this province is strong enough to induce a Canterbury team to visit Auckland, we shall be delighted, but if on the other hand there should appear no willingness on the part of those who engage in the game to travel so far away from home, frankly let it be put to our Auckland visitors. Let us have no more taunting insinuations, suggested by disappointed hopes of a return visit from a Southern team, from our Auckland contemporaries, whether the trial of skill be between the representatives of the two provinces at either cricket or football.