NORTH-SOUTH RUGBY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 15, 6 October 1939, Page 40

NORTH-SOUTH RUGBY

Best Match For Five Years Here is a review of what a " Listener" contributor considers the best Rugby match in New Zealand during the last five years. And with it, at the right moment for an interesting comparison, appears, on the preceding page, a resumé of Mark Nicholls’s final talk on the selection of a World Rugby team HE South Island team which beat North in Wellington on September 23 must have brought a good part of the true flavour of football back to many jaded palates. There has been nothing quite so good in football for anything up to five years. °

They discarded most of the habits which have dragged our Rugby into the mud of mediocrity in recent years. They re-estab-lished a good many of the abiding principles. They played as if they had been drilled to perfection, but not so much that the fire of © individual brilliance had been drilled out of them. The forwards really wefe forwards. They did not try, as the North Island forwards tried, to be backs as well. They stayed in place till the ball went one way or the other. Then they followed it, whether Saxton had flashed away behind the effective screen they made for him, or whether Tindill had managed to clear from the screwing and badly managed North Island scrum. With more spit and polish to them they would have made a really first-class pack. Perhaps to expect them to play as they played in the scrums and rucks, and also to play as Tori Reid played for North in the loose, would have been expecting too much. But an All Black forward must have just a little more than what it takes. You will have heard some criticism of Reid’s forward play. Only because his pro- minence made him easy to criticise. In point of cold fact he was, in nearly every respect, the ideal All Black forward. His try was a really magnificent example of death-or-glory scoring. He is, in spite of @verything said elsewhere about his game, the only forward who gets his name on this page. Five-eighths would be the selector’s greatest worry. Pearman’s play was an example. He started really well, but failed almost miserably when inspiration collapsed into anti-climax against South’s defence. Hooper, of the 1937 team, and Thompson, a muchfancied Wellington inside back, are in the same class; brilliant in their brilliant moments, but not consistent. Off with their heads! Grace, on the other hand, was consistently good. He and Saxton played like target and gun. Even without a safe and solicitous pack, Saxton would have outshone Tindill. He had the edge in speed, running, and passing. This match, and the trials, brought out half-a-dozen first-rate three-quarters. On the first day the play favoured Sutherland, but Morrison seemed at last ton have won through into the top class. He has been nursed long enough now. Wesney was always right. Cunningham, a trial player, was next in the competition for a place. To link Saxton and Grace with the three selected" from these four, Crossman seemed to be the map. Behind them, Taylor and Easton would both make good, sound full-backs. Taylor’s dropped goal was a memory sustaining his reputation right ‘through the following week, but apart from that Easton was his match. é The excitement of the game, even in retrospect, might blanket impartial criticism; yet it still seems, almost a fortnight later, that at last New Zealand footballers have begun to build a monument this generation will remember-if it gets the chance. —