SNUBS AND SNOBBERY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 311, 23 March 1928, Page 10

SNUBS AND SNOBBERY

SO many promises have been broken by the International Rugby Board, and the separate British Unions, that the latest breach of faith—the decision not to send a team to New Zealand in 1930—-will occasion no surprise. Nevertheless, it imposes a severe strain on the Imperial loyalty which forms the principal reinforcement in New Zealan I’s Rugby attachment, and it must inevitably excite the dormant suspicions that purposeful snobbery and discourtesy are at the bottom of the International Board’s indifference. • It is now 20 years since New Zealand was visited by Harding’s Anglo-Welsh team, and in the interim the exchange of visits has been entirely one-sided. Three New Zealand teams, the Services team, tlie All Blacks, and the Maoris, have appeared on playingfields at Home since the war, and in return a British team was promised, first for 1925, then for 1927, 1928 and, finally, 1930. With sublime resignation New Zealand, accepting the positive assurance that this meant the end of the futile procrastination, set itself to wait until 1930, and the result is—another broken promise. It is difficult to analyse the attitude of the Home Unions. The part they played twenty and thirty years ago in developing Rugby in the colonies must not be forgotten. Three teams came to New Zealand, four went to Australia, and four to South Africa. But lately the controlling authorities have developed a superb indifference to the claims of the Dominions. A team was sent to South Africa in 1924, but it paid more attention to dancing than to Rugby, and its showing in the tests, against relatively peak South African sides, was mainly feeble. Last year a “missionary” team was sent to the Argentine, but this could not be classed as an international venture. The Scottish Rugby Union is perfectly frank and open in its hostility to colonial sides, and more especially New Zealand sides, and the explanation is a rankling memory of a raw day in November, 1905. A similar indifference on the part of Ireland is hardly compatible with the genial temperament of Erin, but is partly explained by the fact that there, as in Scotland, Rugby is a class game, to which its democratic New Zealand application exercises no appeal. These influences are a danger to the Imperial atmosphere of Rugby, and their effects, when they culminate in breaches of faith, is profoundly disheartening to a body so loyal as the New Zealand Rugby Lnion. It is clearly a case for patient forbearance in the face of snubs and snobbery. But there is such a thing as a last straw. J.G.M.