The Daily News WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 3. OLD GAMES AND NEW METHODS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume XLVII, Issue 8018, 3 January 1906, Page 2

The Daily News WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 3. OLD GAMES AND NEW METHODS.

The London " Spectator" devotas ai interesting article to the success of the New Zealand Bugby football fifteen. The success of the team has sent the critics writing to the newspapeis, of course, and the gloomierminded amow; them have seen in it traces of fide ;]me in British national physique, powers of endurance, capacity to playgames requiring nei /e, and so on. The " Spr ■/ it or " has very little sympathy with this kind of lamentation. "We do not see any signs that among the classes from whom the teams are picked who have played the New Zealanders there is any deterioration in physique; and as for the alleged incapacity, or comparative incapacity, of Englishmen ta play games demanding stamina and assurance, you would expect, if the allegation were founded on fact, to find Englishmen being beaten in other outdoor sports besides Bugby footiiall. Yet the very opposite is the case." There is, the " Spectator " thinks, a very simple reason, surely, for the continued success of the New Zealanders.

" Am, games are capable of development, can be played in this or that way, can be improved, or altered, or made more scientific or more difficult, even without greatly changing the rules. ... Rules were made for the game, and not the game for the rules. The daring innovator does not so much break old rules as make fresh ones. And so with Rugby football, which since the days when Grew, f the artful dodger,' bowled over Scud East in the first game that Tom Brown saw played at Rugby, has hardly been startled by the rule-breaker or re-vitalised by discoveries. Twelve thousand miles away from the school from which the game took its name the descendants of the football players of Tom Brown's day have been playing the old game among themselves ; but, because they have not. played it with the older players as teachers, they have hit upon secrets which the orthodox have missed. They will be beaten in turn, very likely, when; their opponents have set themselves to discover the srsret of their success, but meanwhile the innovators hold the field. We are paying too graze an attention, it may be suggested, to what after all is merely a game. Looking at it from one point of view, we think not. *** # ■

" There is certainly a ludicrous side to the general dismay when it is remembered that we have all been insisting lately that the great need is to devote less time to games and more to education and ',/jiind.' But there is a serious side also, it ought to be characteristic of any people meaning to go forward to bo determined to be taught by the enemy. That was one of the greatest lessons of the Boer war; it was the lesson which the Austrian generals could not learn from Napoleon. • He broke all the rules of warfare, but he shattered the Austrian generals' armies. That national capability of learning new methods is evinced in small afI fairs such as football just as plainly as in great matters such as war. If the English footballers were unable to learn anything from the New ZeaI nd team, or if they obstinately ad in-ivil to methods proved obsolete by their opponents, that would be evidence of a national characteristic which would have to be noted for what it was worth as a sign of changing times. But the evidence is the other way, we think. If in due timo! the New Zealanders are beaten at the game which they have won the right to call their own, that will be evidence of a capacity for lesson-learning which, so far as it goes, should be a matter of encouragement,"