Why One Aims with the Advancing Foot Bowling from the Shooters’ Stance

 

It makes a lot of sense to place your anchor foot at 45 degrees to the aim line for a lawn bowling delivery. Placed at an angle rather than parallel to the aim line gives more stability when all your weight is on one foot as one steps forward. But why should one step out with one’s advancing foot toe pointing at your stare point on your aim line as also recommended by New Rodda?

 

Following the same argument wouldn’t it give an even more stable base to have that advancing foot also come down firmly at an angle to the aim line? 

I couldn’t understand the difference until recently when I was thinking about a different problem. How could I bowl smoothly if my stepping foot landed with a jolt as I set it firmly down in my delivery? The answer appears to be that I would need to come down on my forward stepping heel and rock forward transferring my weight from heel to sole and finally to my toes as I walked off the mat. But this is only possible if one points the advancing foot  somewhat parallel to the aim line. 

So that is the real reason why Nev Rodda  says to use the advancing foot to aim: the purpose is not really to enhance your aim (as he says, “This is how I like to explain it.”) but rather to smoothly transfer weight from the anchor foot to the advancing foot!

Widening the Head in Preparation for a Drive

A situation can arise in lawn bowls where your side is down several shots in the head but the head is very narrow and makes a poor target for a forcing shot. This can happen when the opposition has some combination of bowls immediately in front of the jack and immediately behind it. The target is thus not much more than one bowl wide.

Attacking in this situation needs to be a two-step strategy. First, your side needs to deliver a bowl roughly jack high with a gap of less than a bowl between it and the bowls in front of and behind the jack. This close bowl can provide the base for a wick in onto the jack or one of the opposition bowls. Because the target has been substantially widened before the heavy shot intended to attack the head, the likelihood of a successful attack will be substantially increased.

When playing triples it is particularly important for the vice to understand that in this situation the vice’s job is to widen the target. The skip’s job is to subsequently disrupt the head with a wick in off the preparatory bowl.

An example of what not to do arises in a match between David Gourley and Kevin Kurkow at the 31:40 minute point. David is two down; the target is just one bowl wide, but he has two bowls remaining. In the instance he drives first and misses the small target, then draws very close, but not enough to reduce the count, with his last. If he had done the reverse he would have had a much enlarged target for a last bowl drive.

When and How to Deliver a Yard-On Shot

 

Turramurra LBC 2015?

An "up-shot", "yard-on" or ”on-shot” is a lawn bowl delivered with weight, greater than a draw shot, indeed enough to displace the jack or disturb other bowls in the head, without killing the end or losing the delivered bowl in the ditch or outside the rink boundaries. It is also referred to as "controlled weight” or as a “rambler".

The on-shot to a medium length jack is, for me, the most difficult shot in bowls. The target must be imagined. The exact length is more difficult to estimate compared with the very short or very long jacks and the correction in aim-angle compared to the normal draw angle is close to the error I have in actually bowling on the aim-angle.

The on-shot can only be dependable if you can correctly imagine the path your bowl would take on the rink if unobstructed. You also need to be able to estimate the velocity with which your bowl needs to hit the assemblage in the head and convert that velocity into an assessment of what distance that weight would carry your bowl if it was unobstructed. Combining this information with the imagined bowl’s unobstructed path that passes through the head provides a target location.

You then need to deliver your bowl with the correct line and length so that, if the path had been unobstructed, it would roll to the target location. To accomplish this, it is helpful if the person directing in the head indicates the target location with his(her) extended foot to provide a distinct target that can be seen from the mat.

An attempted on-shot should never be short. You only give oneself a chance to disrupt an unfavorable head by reaching it! A short bowl may make your next attacking bowl more difficult.

A yard-on shot should be considered when the opponent’s shot bowl is rather close to the jack or the opponent has a number of very close bowls or even if access to the head is simply blocked leaving you down in the count.

 The yard-on shot is characteristically used by skips and vices, not leads (who should be drawing their bowls to build the head and in so doing making sure that all their bowls are behind the jack).