Local Bowls Culture in Portugal

So far I find that the issue of who will take the mat in the opening end is always decided by choosing ‘big’ or ‘little’ from the roll of a bowl. In Canada and Australia, more often there is a coin toss.  Furthermore, the winner here always seems to take the mat. There is no spoken choice; it is just assumed by both sides. This may be because I am playing with people who are all playing on their home green, so they may simply know the grass and want to be first onto the jack. The observation so far is only based on behaviour at the Vilamoura and Valverde LBCs.

Nevertheless, it is startlingly different from practice in Canada where the winner of the usual coin toss almost always gives the mat away and chooses to have skip’s last bowl in the end. The feeling in Canada is also that there is an advantage in seeing the opposition’s opening delivery before having to grass your own bowl.

In the matter of collecting the bowls after an end, practice is not uniform between Valverde and Vilamoura. At Valverde they put out and use rakes like in Canada. At Vilamoura players help to kick the bowls back behind the mat placement.

Lawn Bowls at Valverde LBC Portugal

My wife, Tish, and I bowled yesterday at the Valverde lawn bowls club in southern Portugal. The green is a dense grass cut nice and short with no discolorations or bare spots. If you took a picture from eye level looking down, you would not be able to tell whether it was a rug or grass. All the grass blades are packed tight standing straight up.  Even at 10:30AM it is nearly dry. I did not use my bowls cloth after the first few ends.

The game was open triples on two rinks and open pairs on two rinks; however, every six ends the teams, the team positions, the opponents and the rinks were changed. Everyone had their own score card and the individual best plus/minuses won cash prizes after three rounds. An interesting variant was that in the first two ends of the first mini-game the maximum score was 1. In this way no trial ends were needed. This format is played at Valverde every Friday and it affords the maximum opportunity for everybody to meet on the green.  I played skip twice and lead once. I was +5 on the day. My performance in the first match which we lost with me skipping put me out of the money. Consistency is everything in bowls!

A point of contention arose during one of the mini-games. My lead delivered a bowl that came to rest leaning in a standing position against the jack. I told my skip opposite that I was nominating that bowl as a toucher since I wouldn’t dare try to mark it because it could fall and push away the jack. As we changed positions and the skips were going to the mat, the opposing lead said that this was not correct nomination. When I said that it was, she declared “Perhaps according to your rules” or something to that effect.

No harm was done to me although I apologized to the opposing skip saying that I was afraid I had upset her. Anyway the rule from Crystal Mark Third Edition of the Laws of World Bowls reads:

15.2 If, in the opinion of either skip or opponent or the marker, a toucher comes to rest in a position in which marking it would be likely to move the bowl or alter the head, the bowl must not be marked but nominated as a toucher instead.

15.3 If, before the next delivered bowl comes to rest or, in the case of the last bowl of an end, before a period of 30 seconds that applies under law 23.1, a bowl is neither marked nor nominated, it is no longer a toucher.

This club is owned by its members and they say, justifiably, that it is the friendliest bowling club. A club member was immediately into the parking lot to greet us and show us around when we first found the place and the secretary of the club had even helped to find us suitable accommodation when we contacted her over the internet before we left for Portugal!

Here they do use rakes to collect the bowls. The bowls available for visitors are of more recent vintage than those on offer at Vilamoura LBC and they are carefully arranged according to size while those at Vilamoura were totally haphazard. The Valverde bowls for the most part have grips while Vilamoura’s mostly do not.

Valverde has a restaurant right next to it where I expect food and drinks would be available. When we arrived this was closed since January is a slow month for tourists. Vilamoura has a bar in the tiny club house with plenty of tables and chairs on the patio next to one of the two greens. Vilamoura has more parking and that parking is more accessible.

Both these clubs are thoroughly English. While on the greens you will not think you are in a foreign language country. If you are leaving winter behind for several months I suspect Portugal is better value than the southern United States. I will say more after I give the USA a winter trial some other year. 

First Club Game at Vilamoura LBC

Tuesday January 13^th I played my first game since the end of the playing season in Canada. Twenty three club members and I showed upon by 1:30PM so that we were able to play three rinks of fours. I played lead and a reasonable number of my bowls survived to contribute to the score. I had practiced for a couple of hours on two previous days so I was able to at least be behind the jack most of the time when I wasn’t right on it. My team had the second best performance on the day and each team member got to choose a bottle of wine. I took a Portuguese red on the theory that the local organizers would make a better choice than my own random selection from the store.  I had a few glasses at supper and was not disappointed!

In the game the similarities with Canada were:

·         There is no center line

·         Most bowlers automatically place the mat at the two meter line

·         The green  was  about the same speed

·         There are no practice ends

·         Participants are very friendly and welcoming

The differences were:

·         The bowls are kicked back to a position behind the mat

·         It is assumed that the mat is going to be placed at 2 meters by          the team

·         Participants do not faithfully were their name tags

·         Participants do wear their club shirts

·         except for one set all the bowls used were black

·         most of the sets of bowls were Taylor Lignoids but they didn’t        play any wider than my Vector VS play on grass at home; that          is my aim point was usually around the boundary marker

·         the match was 18 ends (but the air temperature was only 16 C)

A very thankful difference from Canada was that the clubhouse did have a bar so we were able to have some lubricated socializing after the match!

Advantages a Triples Team Could Have

Besides the skills of the team members as individuals, what advantages can one triples team have over another in lawn bowls?

In the opening end, each team member delivers an opening bowl, under circumstances where (s)he does not know the amount of grass to give for a draw shot. The lead can get no advice, but the other team members need to be able to convert information from these lead deliveries to arrive at an aim line useful for their own shots. Therefore, team members must know their partners’ bowls. For example, if the lead reports that on the left side (s)he needs to aim at the boundary mark, the second should know that, for his(her) bowls, that translates into aiming, for example, two feet wide of the boundary marker. Or if only the vice has bowled the wide side in one of the directions, the skip needs to be able to interpret the information that the vice gained aiming on that side. The object is to provide to each team member whatever useful information another team member possesses; but, in a form that is adjusted for any differences between their bowls and/or their handedness.

A second area of potential advantage is in communication between the head and the mat. This is done by signaling, since yelling invariably proves inadequate over this distance, as we all have experienced. Signals should enable the person at the head to direct, and the person on the mat to ask questions. For some signals, it matters little if they are obvious to opponents. For others, the signal’s meaning must be opaque to the opponents. Signals cannot meet every need. In complex situations, when the rules allow, the bowler should be called to the head to confer with the skip. 

Pushers and the ‘Shuffleboard’ Delivery

Lawn bowling grips can be divided into two categories. Those in the first category allow a person to hold a lawn bowl with arm and fingers of that hand pointed straight down.  These are all variants of the ‘claw’ between thumb and fingers. The second category of grip uses gravity to hold the bowl on top of some variant of a palm/fingers combination. These are variations of the palm grip.

People who suffer from arthritis may not be able to use their thumb to secure a bowl. No variation of claw grip is possible for them. They have no choice but palm grips. If these bowlers are to have any backswing, they must bend their elbow as they draw their arm back so that the bowl is steady in the palm of their hand. Bowl and arm are then pushed forward to release the bowl just as is done pushing the disc in shuffleboard. In fact I am calling this a shuffleboard delivery. Because fingers must be under the bowl, the bowl quite literally rolls off the finger tips.  A variant of bowling arm ( the Ubi Launcher^TM MSV Sports) is designed based on the same type of delivery. With some claw grips the fingers are more nearly down the back of the bowl rather than under it. The majority of bowling arms have adopted a mimic of the claw grip with two prongs symmetrically behind the bowl and one retractable one gripping the bowl on the running surface in front.

 Another way to handle these limitation on hand flexibility and hand strength is to get rid of any backswing while still using the palm grip. The starting position for forward motion is the bowling arm more or less vertical with the bowl in the palm grip, and the wrist slightly cocked so the palm is more or less horizontal under the bowl. The thumb is either under or along the side of the bowl.  In this configuration, the person executing the shuffleboard delivery needs to take a relatively longer step forward to add more velocity for long jacks on slow greens. All the bowl’s energy must come from faster combined body/arm movement, because there is no potential energy providing extra speed from elevation of the bowl. In another variant the bowler starts with the advancing foot already completely out in front. This is the complete ‘pusher’s’ delivery.

When the fingers are under the bowl the delivery seems to be much more sensitive to the location of the index finger on the running surface. When the fingers are more behind the bowl when it is released onto the carpet finger position seems to be of lesser importance.

Because these ‘shuffleboard’ bowlers need to accelerate their arm motion so much to get the required bowl velocity, they have an increased tendency to release the bowl too far in front of their advancing foot. This causes frequent narrow bowls for long jacks on slower greens.

The Effective Rate Statistic to Grade Lawn Bowling Performance

Commentators on lawn bowls videos often mention a competitor’s ‘effective rate’. A bowl is commonly seen as 'effective' if it improves the provisional score, i.e. it reduces the count against, converts, or increases the count in favor. This criterion remains fairly valid even in adverse conditions, i.e. when there is a gusty, variable wind, which tends to spread heads because the conditions affect all competitors. An alternative measure, distance from the jack, is strongly affected by weather and rink conditions. Effective rate also remains fairly valid within different levels of skill (i.e. A grade, C grade, etc). Another advantage is that collection of 'effectiveness' data can be done during a competition without intrusion or distraction. Thus commentators can have a running score for the effective rate for every competitor.

A perfect game does not correlate with a 100% effective rate because covering shots, block shots, and other positional bowls may not fit the ‘effective’ definition even though they are tactically correct.

A bowler competing out of his class will lose his matches badly and will have a very low effective rate. To win an end in singles one must achieve at least an effective rate of 25%; that is, the last bowl must convert the head! A bowler can lose an end even if his effective rate on the end is 100% if he bowls first because his competitor can still convert the head and score with the last bowl. The median effective rate thus is likely to be around 62-63%. Top bowlers playing well can have effective rates of 85%.

2015 Greenbowler Blog Present for Followers

Whether you are a practicing Christian or not, I want to wish all my followers a happy and peaceful Christmas, and a prosperous and successful New Year in 2016.

The unusually mild and dry weather these last few days in Toronto, Canada has allowed me the extraordinary pleasure of practicing outside on the synthetic green at James Gardens both yesterday and the day before. A fortnight from now I expect to be playing again in the Algarve province of Portugal at the Vilamoura and Valverde Lawn Bowls Clubs.

As a gift for all, I recommend a link below to an  exciting singles match from the 2014 world indoor championship. It features a rare, intentional short blocking shot at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZxMYJ6KCK0

Going Overseas to Bowl

The last month of the year is dribbling away. In Canada, the weather is getting near zero Celsius. Soon there will be snow in Toronto but New Year’s Eve my wife and I will fly away to Portugal where we will get the chance to lawn bowl at the Valverde and Vilamoura lawn bowling clubs in the state of Algarve.  We will stay until the end of March. The average daily temperature there is only between 9°C and 16°C, but temperatures in the sun are reported to be in the low twenties. This can’t match the 30-40 degrees in Australia at the same time of year but for hearty Canucks it will be just fine! We are told we will meet a lot of Brits in spring training for the 2016 English outdoor bowls season and because the area depends so much on tourism not knowing Portuguese will be no problem.
I’m already champing at the bit. I would be lost in retirement without bowls.