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.