Lawn Bowls Tactics with Short Jacks

When you are losing a lawn bowls competition some change is required. That change may be resorting to short jack lengths.

Situation 1

If your side is trying to roll short jacks, the moment the jack stops rolling your skip should move the jack towards the center line with his foot.  If the center line is marked, centering can be done without the help of the lead which means that the lead can speedily be ready to bowl. If the opposition skip calls for a measure, of course, you should immediately agree. The club will have an appropriate tape measure available. However, if a different player from the opposing team calls for a measure from the mat you should hold up your lead briefly to give the opposition skip a chance to speak out. It is their skip who must question the length. A member of the other team may call out the distance the mat is up the rink. If nothing is said, signal your lead to proceed to bowl. Once the first bowl has been put down the jack length can no longer be questioned.

Situation 2

If you are playing under the condition of no dead ends with re-spotting at the 2 meter mark and you are both (i) ahead in the game and (ii) have the mat, you should bowl your lead’s preferred length with the mat placed so that the jack will end up about 2 meters from the front ditch. This way there is little chance to drive the jack out of bounds, but there is plenty of opportunity to drive opposing non-touchers into the ditch or out of bounds.

Situation 3

When your side is trying for short jacks, the best chance to get a playable jack at a short length is to move the mat up until it is two meters short of the hog line. Then you will have two meters in front of the T line and two meters behind it to receive your jack delivery while still being at least the minimum distance.

Situation 4

 If it is the last end and you have the mat but are behind in the score, deliver a short jack from a mat position such that the re-spot position is three meters behind the jack. This will give you the best chance for a big end. Trailing the jack, putting the jack in the ditch or driving the jack out of bounds for a re-spot all offer different results.

Besides tactical changes on the green, you can change the pace of the game. You can even cause a break in a game by requesting a measure to see whether a short jack is the required 23 meters from the front edge of the mat (21 meters in Canada). Your side may even have delivered this where you request a measure. This is legal. It can cause the other team to lose its concentration. They may subsequently choose longer jacks to avoid your requests. In a timed game it can shorten the number of ends played against a stronger team.

A Streak of Rubbish Bowls

When I took up lawn bowling I read that this game was at least 90% mental and only 10% or less physical skill. Mostly, I have continued to struggle with the supposed 10% but now that I have run into a run of ‘rubbish bowls’ I begin to understand the supreme importance of confidence to playing good bowls.

Since the beginning of January my wife and I have been playing bowls either at the Valverde LBC in Almancil or at the Balaia LBC which is located on the grounds of the Balaia Golf Village just east of Albufeira, both in the Algarve in Portugal.

The weather here has been great; however, my bowling has been aweful. That is:  I am full of awe at exactly how consistently bad it has been. But, this gives me the opportunity to write about how I handled a streak of poor performance.

 I did not handle it well! Instead of accepting that rough spots can arise from time to time and that one’s subconscious muscle memory will likely soon assert itself and the problem will disappear as mysteriously as it arose, I regularly panic and conclude that I am just not cut out for this sport and that  I have wasted more than a half-dozen years of my retirement trying to improve.

If possible the problem should be addressed during the game in which it first arises. You should have conducted in advance a self-analysis of your delivery that has identified a personal list of the most frequent deterioration in your ideal delivery. In my case I have found two that I have identified more than twice. By far the most frequent is not getting my forward stepping foot firmly planted before swinging my arm forward to launch my bowl. I have written about this problem repeatedly in my blogs. When this happens one cannot consistently pass near a stare point.

  The second  deviation that I have identified more than once is selecting a stare point more than 5 meters up the green with the result that my bowl has started to curl even before it passes this point and consequently I become confused about the proper line.

My difficulty during this last ‘rubbish bowls’ period was more complicated. At the same time as I was consistently missing rolling my bowl over my stare point I was all over the place with regard to weight. As it turned out I was suffering from two deviations from proper delivery at the same time and the interplay of these caused this random erring.  How did I diagnose what was going wrong? I reread my own blog articles describing my proper delivery. The line missing was as usual attributable to stepping out late-after I had already begun my arm swing. The error in length was not caused by my failure to mentally imagine the path of the bowl from hand to jack (this is the most frequent  cause) but  by me bending my elbow as I released the bowl giving it a slight spin as it came out of my hand. For me, my arm should remain straight as I release my bowl and remain pointing at a 45 degree angle towards the ground as I step forward off the mat. This is modelled after Alex Marshall MBE.

Nevertheless, even if you cannot identify what is causing a run of bad bowls so long as you have been bowling for several years your muscle memory will most likely correct any delivery defect in future matches so long as you don’t dwell on the problem and over-think it. This over-thinking is my cross to bear!