Keeping Score

I recently played in an open tournament for novices where the teams were chosen randomly by draw(Cosburn Park,Toronto). The result is that you mostly play with strangers and against strangers. I was playing as a vice and the skips were keeping score. There was no scoreboard. I eventually hollered to my skip to get the score, because I knew it was the last end. My skip either could not hear or understand me but an opponent offered that the score was 8-12. We had been losing the most recent ends andI  presumed that we were behind. I played shots that offered the best prospect to score 4 points! As you can imagine these would have been quite different if I had understood that we were 4 up! Fortunately, I did not manage to completely bugger things up and we won the match.

The morale: keep your own score sheet if there is no public scoreboard, especially, if communication within the team is poor for some reason.  

The Importance of a Smooth Delivery

In a smooth delivery the bowl is grassed without wobble. Wobble is that side-to-side shaking of an improperly delivered bowl. It is most pronounced immediately after release. Wobble usually corrects itself before the bowl finally comes to rest and for this reason many lawn bowlers think it has little effect on the precision of their deliveries. It is only, they think, that when wobble becomes very exaggerated, as when it is called a pineapple, that it has an effect on both the intended weight and line.

Bowls that take little grass are the most susceptible to wobble from improper delivery. There has been considerable controversy about narrow running bowls, sometimes called ‘cheater bowls’.  These bowls are legal according to the present International Rules of the Sport of Bowls. They have a running surface engineered with a cross sectional curvature such that, when tested, without introducing any wobble, on the standard bowls testing table, the bowl does take the approved minimum grass (bias from straight) set by the International Laws of Bowls. Yet, if the same bowl is delivered, on the same testing table with some wobble, it does not curve the required amount. Furthermore, and what is of more practically significant, when it is delivered under outdoor conditions on grass, even without wobble, it again does not show the minimum bias exhibited by a standard bowl under the same conditions.

Since I am a novice, I am most often playing lead in competitions and I have chosen to use relatively narrow running Taylor Vector VS bowls. Since my entry into the head is unlikely to be seriously blocked, the shortest path to the jack is the least likely to suffer misadventure. But there is a linked risk. On a less than perfect rink, the effect of wobble seems to be compounded. Perhaps the combination of momentarily running on the edge of the bowl’s running surface and a sudden deviation in the green surface seems to throw the trajectory off more significantly. I have noticed that on the James Gardens’ synthetic surface, where the seams are beginning to appear a bit raised above the rest of the surface, delivering with any wobble can significantly divert my bowl from its intended path. Thus a smooth release of a perfectly upright bowl becomes a high priority.