Personalities In Sport

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 411, 20 July 1928, Page 10

Personalities In Sport

Morgan Hayward Is Last Link With Great Days of Thames Rugby

This season, 19 years after he first represented Thames, Morgan Hayward is once more leading the Thames Rugby reps. And what, too, shall one say of his brother, Harold, who first represented Auckland in 1903, and finally hung up his rep. jersey in 1923, no fewer than 21 seasons after his first game for Auckland? There have been some great football families in New Zealand, and the Haywards of Thames deserve a place among the McKenzies, Robertses, Wilsons and others, who took to Rugby as ducks to water, and always had younger members of the family coming on to take their places. 11. Hayward’s 21 years, of football included the highest honours in the game. In 1908. he went from Auckland to the North Island team, and then to the All Blacks. It was the year of A. F. Harding’s Anglo-Welsh team. New Zealand walked oif with the first test in Dunedin, took things easy at Wellington and could only make it a draw. Out went a call for the Old Brigade of 1905 to meet the Englishmen at Auckland in the third and final test. That wonderful quartette, Fred Roberts, Bill Speud. Jimmy Hunter and the late Bob Deans, went back into their old positions in the backs. Bill Cunningham locked the scrum, Charlie Seeling and Frank Glasgow were in the pack, and George Gillett wingforward. It was a great tribute to Hayward that ho was chosen to represent New Zealand in such company. Not only that, but he was one of the best forwards in a side which outplayed the Englishmen fore and aft, winning by 29 points to nil. Hayward himself was one of the try-getters. MEMORIES OF OLD THAMES Shift back again to Thames and some of those great teams of 20 and 20 years ago which used to go out to Potter’s Paddock and clean up Auckland’s best. There was generally a. Hayward among them, if not the dashing, crashing “Circus,” then another brother, and after them came Morgan to carry on the family tradition. The Haywards originally came from Blenheim, in the South Island, but when Morgan was still a youngster his parents shifted up to the goldfields at Thames.

It would take a book to write the full Rugby history of the Haywards. They played at both codes, and Morgan still recalls with a reminiscent grin some of their experiences with the Hew Zealand League team in Australia in 1912. At Brisbane, the game was extra willing, an Australian player was ordered off, and the crowd stoned the New Zealanders’ as they left the ground. A similar experience befell Hick Roberts’s 1914 All Blacks. In 1915 the Haywards went back to the Union Rugby fold. One of the notable events of Morgan’s career came in 1923. the year Auckland swept up all challengers on Eden Park. Morgan captained Auckland in the Southland match, an honour of which he is justly proud. Year 192 S finds Morgan Hayward

still on deck, last survivor of those sreat teams which came up from the goldfields in years gone by to wrest the honours from Auckland at the height of its Rugby greatness. As long as the same is played in the Thames, the name of Hayward will be remem|bered as typifying all that was best

lin the old-time Rugby forward, ol J whom we see all too little in these days of amended rules and packmen, who seek the high-lights of open-field play.