THE CRICKETERS

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVI, Issue 16751, 5 January 1915, Page 6

THE CRICKETERS

It is not very easy to work up enthusiasm for field sports while the great war game is being played in Europe, but since wo have been urged, to live, as far as may be, our normal life, we may rejoice over our little victories in the world of sport, even if the fato of the Plunket Shield lias ceased to be a matter of any importance. Not very many followers of cricket would have been surprised and not many would have been grieved if the Canterbury team had failed to beat the Aucklanders yesterday, but fortune favoured the southerners, and Canterbury has another very meritorious victory to record against the northern province. It was an excellent performance on the part of our representatives, and the game ended in the best possible way, from our point of view, in success by the barest margin. The achievement of the Canterbury team in scoring just short of three hundred runs in the last innings of the match shows that the spirit of dogged determination is far from dead, though as a scoring effort it is easily overshadowed by Otago's remarkable recovery in the match against Wellington. The experts, we understand, anticipated that Wellington would dispose of Otago quite as easily as Canterbury did, and the view has been, freely expressed, particularly in the north, that Wellington would prove the strongest cricketing province this year. The situation is certainly very interesting, for Wellington had the better of the drawn game against Auckland. The central province's attack, however, would appear to be far from strong, and if that is the case its claim to supremacy can hardly be accepted as valid. The season has favoured the batsmen, and we are not disposed to draw very positive conclusions from the fact that the scoring has been running high. Under normal international conditions we should have looked to find cricket making exceptional progress throughout the Dominion this year, but the thoughts of the people, we know, aTQ far away from the playing fields. Canterbury's fine performance in the lawn tennis championships, for example, has attracted no general attention, and as for the cricket position, the discussion seems to have been confined to an unusually limited circle.