Complaints from Leads and Vices about Skips

I played in a pretty prestigious tournament at the Toronto Cricket Club a few days ago and I can tell you there is rebellion brewing in the ranks. While the skips are down at the head, leads and seconds are talking quietly among themselves. Perhaps this has been so since time immemorial. Perhaps it is something new. I don’t know; remember, I am just a second-year novice.

But what the foot soldiers are saying rather generally is that skips don’t take account of the limitations of team members. The skips may be correct about the shots they are calling for from a tactical or strategic point of view.  No-one’s arguing about that; but, they are more often wrong about what the person on the mat is confident about trying or comfortable with. The skip cannot know we have a wonderful aim point on the side (s)he is calling you off of, or that you have no idea of the correct grass on the hand where you are being asked to bowl. The skip cannot know that there is nothing wrong with your line, you just haven’t hit it yet! Perhaps some skips should stop subconsciously trying to show off their experience and think more about the actual capabilities of their team members.

What would I do if I were a skip for a young team with partially developed skills?  I would tell them that I was instituting a new system. I would continue to signal my preferred choices of hand and target, but I would implement a system more like baseball, where the pitcher can shake off a sign from the catcher. My bowler on the mat, would just shake his or her head indicating, “I am not comfortable with what you are asking.” If as a skip, mine is only a mild preference, I would signal for the bowler to make the choice. If I felt that there was a very strong reason for what I was asking, I would call the bowler up to the head and point it out. My impression is that this would occur rather infrequently. Much less frequent for example than skips visit the head when they are bowling themselves.

As for draw games where the skips know their team members almost not at all, I think a wise skip should almost always invite a choice by the bowler. It will make the game more enjoyable for all and, I think, produce better outcomes. Nothing is really more ridiculous than for a skip to call for a refined draw through a narrow port, when the poor novice, like myself, feels lucky to get anywhere within three meters of the kitty.

Pushers: Difficulties with the Backswing When Using the Cradle Grip

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The other day I was helping my coach to supervise the first lessons of new bowlers and I met a beginner who could not use her thumb in opposition to her other fingers to hold the bowl, as is required in the variations of the claw grip. She was already using a 0-0 size bowl. This lady explained her difficulty and showed me her hand. Apparently, because of arthritis, her thumb was effectively confined to the plane of her palm. The thumb was not immobile but even when it was assisted to take an out-of-plane position it had no strength to hold a bowl.  For this reason, she had to palm the bowl in what is called the cradle grip with all her fingers and her thumb on the same side of the bowl. 

It seems to me that people with this slight disability cannot dependably use the standard delivery, because they cannot grasp their bowl sufficiently tightly for a standard backswing. My pedagogical comments to her had been all, not exactly wrong but just useless. It seems to me that bowlers who use a cradle grip for whatever reason must employ a very modest to non-existent backswing; must step forward with an exaggerated long stride; and must accompany it with a matching long follow-through. The power required to reach long jacks needs to come from the acceleration in the push they apply to the bowl since they cannot use the energy (called potential energy by physicists) gained by elevating the bowl in the backswing. ‘Pushers’, as they are called, very often also begin their delivery arm motion from a stance with their foot opposite slightly ahead of the nearer foot. Push bowlers can be very good bowlers. There is no automatic impediment to their estimation of line and weight derived from the grip and delivery. I warn you from experience not to underestimate these people. If you wish to explore a related weakness, I sense that bowling to long jacks could more easily tire them on heavy greens.