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!