FOOTBALL CONQUERS SPAIN.

Hokitika Guardian, 11 April 1924, Page 4

FOOTBALL CONQUERS SPAIN.

(By G. Ward Price in Daily -Mail). Ask- an Englishman what they raise at-Seville and lie will say’, “Oranges” ; ask a Spaniard and he will answer, “Bulls.” The Englishman is quite right. Looking out of the sleeping-car across .a- raw, rainsoaked countryside, the first tiling I saw was an orange-tree, incongruously spangled with gjolden fruit. Under tile leaden sky it looked like a specimen strayed from a Kew Gardens hot-house into an English winter. Oddly enough, the Spaniard’s answer may soon ho quite wrong. For an unprecedented thing has happened at Seville, an event which impressed Hie Spanish nation more deeply than did General Primo’s revolution. An important hull light at the. very end of the season had to he postponed because Seville was playing .Madrid that day at “fut-hol.”

Football, spelt as above, is spreading through Spain like a sporting epidemic. Posters announcing big matches for the coining Sunday meet the eye everywhere. Till lately it was no more than an exotic amusement which athletic British residents in Spain were risking their hones to teach to a few fiery Spaniards. Now from the Prado boulevard in Madrid to the hack-alleys of the remotest country town the small hoys of Spain arc shooting at goal with all the keenness of their kind in Britain. Madrid' lias half a dozen first-class clubs ; Barcelona as luaiiy more; four British League teams are to tour the country after the Cun Final, for in Spain there is no football season ; they play the game under a sweltering summer sun as vigorously as in the hitter wind of a Madrid winter, on grounds as hard as ail asphalt tennis-court. When the Cafe Ingles, the recognised resort of the toreros in Madrid, closed its doors for lack of business, “fulbol” more than anything else was responsible for the “slump.” A Span isli count with whom I was travelling had friends among the landowners who breed hulls tor the ring, lie admitted the decline of the pasttime once so popular in Spain that- it was referred to simply ns the aficion the “passion.” He pointed from lie train to some deserted paddocks. enclosed with eight-fect-high posts and rails of a solidity that caught the eye in a countryside where agricultural works are still of mediaeval primitiveneas. That was a hull-breeding establishment. he explained, of the kind that feels the rivalry of the now Spanish taste for Soccer. Here and there a very narrow trench, about four feet deep. had been dug in the enclosure. 'I hese, 1 learned, were refuges in which anyone on foot who was chased hv the bulls could take shelter till the mounted heardsmen came up to drive them off. Cowering in that ditch with a pair of sharp horns prolong for him just outside the parapet, the refugee must know how a winkle feels when the pin appears at the opening ot his shell.

LESS SKILFUL BULL-FIGHTERS. But. in addition to loot hall. it seems that the decline of tile bullfighters themselves is responsible for the ebb of the popularity of the bullring. Its great clays were from 1820 to about 1880. Then the toreros were of a skill now unknown. Almost to a man they came from a single suburb of Seville' called Triana, and were so tired to the game that- they inherited an uncanny instinct for hull ps.vrliolngv which told them exactly what: each animal would do as they faced it. On this period of highly scientific hull fighting followed a time when wild recklessness became the fashion in the arena. Matadors faced ihe bull in fetters, or, sitting in a chair, allowed him lo charge them, and in the lasi fraction of a second leaped over the' stabbing horns and leit the* chair living in splinters behind them. Gallito, gored lo death at Talavera about three years ago, was the last of these break-neck idols o! the aficionados. As with the popular spectacles of other hinds, the money that poured into the hull ring ended by swamping it. Gallito used to lie paid £'2-81 for a single afternoon’s appearance-—of Wi.ich, after paying his cuadrilln of assistants, some 1)200 was personal remuneration. He often flew from one engagement to another by aeroplane. But big money leads to soft living, and now, say disappointed Spaniards, the torero has become a man of luxury, far inferior in skill to those hard-bitten, t ight-lipped, ninny-scar-red products of the narrow lanes of Triana, who would light a ton weight of speed and temper and dagger-like horns for a few pesetas, a handful of cigars, and the adulation ot an hysterically cheering crowd.