A DAILY MESSAGE

Hokitika Guardian, 28 June 1929, Page 1

A DAILY MESSAGE

CRICKET Ciuckut! A great word! Jt isn’t only the name of a famous game. If is the name of an equally famous code—the code which honourable men and women the world over employ in their relations with one another.

Cricket is not just a game of bat and ball, runs, and wickets. It is a game wi li ethics, and it is the ethics of tho game that teach those who play it how to play cricket in the greater game of life.

Cricket places the team above the unit; honour above victory; tho goal above the prize. Grip the ethics of cricket, and you have hold of ethics which will give you a high average when the score is posted at tho dose of the game of life.

How the idiom of the national game of cricket pervades the national speech! “ it isn’t cricket,” is the way in which we describe an action which is not quite square. A nasty trick, we say, “is not cricket.” The accomplishment of a difficult feat—single-handed—we describe as doing a thing “off one’s own hat.”

At times, in cricket as well as in life, the parasitical fungus of trickery and low tactics arises; hut it is soon killed by the influence Gf those who are ever conscious of the great traditions of the great game; and, anyhow, most people feel safer with a sportsman where straight howling is nccesasry on tTie held of life than they do with the professional philanthropist.

Australia’s cricketers leave her shores for the playing-fields of England, there to uphold the finest traditions (if cricket and manhood ; the honour and pride of this young country is in their keeping.

AA’o send them forth with all the good faith and goodwill of a Commonwealth. We believe they will bring us. in return, a greater' wealth of good faith and goodwill from a commonwealth vet more vast.

Life may hold for these sportsmen many opportunities, but none greater than this.

Every Australian citizen will follow the game they play, the records they make, the achievements they attain.

We shall glory in well-merited victories, and sympathize in honourable defeat. We !>c!ie\-<- that our tenm will shew the world that Australians are great descendants of a great race, who play the great game in a great way.

—AI. PRESTON STANLEY