The Problem of Bad Jack Delivery in Lawn Bowls

 

Alas, Good-bye Portugal 2018

Leads at lawn bowling clubs are usually the least experienced, most unskilled bowlers.

Singles players deliver their own jacks, but singles competitions are relatively rare except at the highest echelons of the sport.

As a consequence, you will rarely see any player practicing delivering jacks to precise distances. This is just the way the world is and I accept it. What I am ready to complain about is the increasingly common practice of skips that simply place the jack at a proper length when it is delivered too short or place it on the tee when it is delivered into the ditch. Yes- when a lead fumbles with the jack it is annoying and it slows down the game; but, to not return it for delivery by the opposing lead insults the contribution of leads in general and good leads in particular.

In the matches against touring English teams that  I have been playing in  these last few weeks at the Valverde Bowls Club (before returning to Canada), I have seen this three or four times. Only once was the jack returned, as required by the rules, to the opposing lead.

I will grant you that there may be some skips who are so frustrated by the inability of leads to deliver the jack the length called for, that they just give up on that part of the tactical game. On the other hand, I rarely hear a skip call out, “Good jack!” to his/her lead to encourage them. Dumbing down our game is not going to make it more popular.    

Taking the Mat when Playing on End Rinks at Lawn Bowls

Greenbowler has talked about the pros and cons between ‘taking the mat’ or letting the opponents ‘lead the way’. Whatever readers’ opinions on this may be, there is one situation where the decision is even more clear cut than usual. An example arose in a match I played this year.

 
We were playing on an end rink. Such rinks tend to have a chronic problem of wonkiness. Very often the hand closest to the side ditch is seriously un-level or the grass is patchy or trampled down. There is a serious risk that only the other hand will be playable. If you win the toss, you take the mat and try to get that first bowl in on the side away from this possible trouble. If you get shot, it is very easy to block up this playable side.

 In this particular instance, the opponents won the toss but gave the mat away. We got off to a good start. As lead, I never delivered a single bowl on the hand close to the side ditch. When bowls seemed to block my preferred hand, I changed my position on the mat to avoid those bowls but kept bowling the same hand. Many times our opponents tried to draw on the wonky side, almost uniformly with bad results.

Twenty five percent of lawn bowling rinks are end rinks. Be prepared for their special strategic requirements.

Head Reading at Lawn Bowls: The Enemy Cluster and the Need for Cover

Sometimes when you are ‘up’ in a head, the greatest tactical danger is a cluster of enemy bowls somewhere behind the jack.  The level of danger is usually proportional to the largest area contained within a polygon formed by joining the bowl positions by imaginary straight lines. For example, three bowls close together can be visualized being in a triangle; four enemy bowls close together can be visualized as being either in the quadrilateral or the largest triangle that can be made from the positions of any three of the bowls.

Even a grouping of two opposition bowls behind the jack can represent an incipient cluster because if the other side trails the jack back towards these bowls, the delivered bowl can often become part of the cluster.

The danger is that the jack may be moved to a location where all these opposing bowls will become counters.  The resolution of this danger is for your side to deliver a bowl into this polygon shaped area.  

Head Reading at Lawn Bowls: The Motif of the ‘Firm Wood Target’

 The motif called ‘firm wood target’ is a configuration of two bowls that sit about one bowl width apart side by side short of the jack. Preferably these two bowls sit centered in front of the jack. These two bowls can be any mixture of your own and opposition bowls. The essential characteristic of this configuration is that the gap between these bowls is such that it is highly unlikely or impossible for you to deliver a bowl that passes between them without touching one or the other of them.

Such a configuration promises a wide target with several promising outcomes when a bowl is delivered at them with a few meters of weight.

If both bowls in the pair are opposition bowls your shot should be delivered with the more weight. The objective is to remove both bowls and have your own bowl trickle on a bit to end up near the jack.

 When one of the pair is an opposing bowl and the other is your own, favorable outcomes arise when you achieve the same double takeout as described above as well as when you strike your own bowl into the shot position. Because the possibility also exists for you to promote the opposition bowl it is required thatthis opposing bowl be already a counter.

When both bowls in the pair are your own any hit on the pair with sufficient weight to move one or both will be favorable for you. It is the most preferred situation.

The slower the green the more likely a successful outcome becomes from this shot. The slower the green the firmer and straighter this shot needs to be delivered.

The 'Plant' Motif in Head Reading at Lawn Bowls

In a lawn bowling head, two bowls touching each other are what is called a 'plant' situation. Contact with the shorter bowl will send the second bowl away precisely along the line connecting the centers of the two bowls. This is the tactical advantage: that even if the closer bowl is not hit flush, the further bowl will move in an exactly predictable direction.  A plant can involve more than two bowls so long as each bowl touches the next. As before, the main bowl that moves is the bowl furthest from the mat and it moves dependably along the line joining the centers of it and the bowl it is in contact with in the 'plant' arrangement.

A skip analyzing a head should be on the lookout for a 'plant'. The two bowls can be both yours, both opponent’s, or one yours and one the opponent’s. In each case, the potential is the same. A hit on the shorter bowl will cause the further bowl to move predictably by recoil action. The distance it will move is determined by the vigor with which the pair is impacted. The shorter bowl that is hit may not move much at all if hit squarely.

The distance the further bowl moves is affected by both the angle and the velocity with which the closer bowl is impacted but if that distance is not critical then the chance of success is higher.