Tournament Play and Improvement

Everywhere you look the advice is the same: play with and against the best players you can find to improve quickly. In Canada, team play is not divided by pennants or skill divisions as in Australia. When you play in a tournament you play against the top people, over and over and so you lose over and over.  The more you practice the more pressure you apply to yourself. And of course you expect some improved performance to match the extent of the practice time committed. The more failure, the more practice, the more heightened the expectations, the more serious the disappointment. 

After four years I have to admit this doesn’t work for me.  I have started to play club events almost exclusively. I was appreciated. I got good results playing club bowlers. I relaxed. My draw accuracy and consistency improved in absolute terms.

So, my conclusion is this: if you are not competing in a ‘streamed’ environment where you play against opponents close to your own skill level and where you can advance gradually as you succeed, you should not compete where you will be always defeated . This is not the professional wisdom but it is what I personally find.

That Foot on or over the Mat: Crystal Mark Three

Foot-faulting is Still Possible

I played mixed pairs against a more experienced skip yesterday. After the match, he said, “Stand on the mat as you do when you are ready to deliver a bowl.” When I did, he pointed out that my anchor foot was only partially on the mat. My heel was off the mat. The ball of my foot was on.

“In a playdown  ( Ontario Regional Competition) you would be called for foot faulting,” he said.

“Not according to the new Crystal Mark Third Edition of The World Laws of Bowls,” I told him. “It only requires part of a foot to be on or over the mat at delivery.”

This is an important point. Many more experienced bowlers were brought up with the old foot fault rule: one foot must be entirely on or over the mat.  Bowlers, like myself, who have adopted the ‘shooters’ stance’ will have a greater tendency to have the anchor foot partially off the mat, because that foot is not lined up parallel to their aim line. In any case, calling foot faults was always a tedious business. Whether a player has a full foot or a partial foot on the mat is not going to make a difference to any game’s outcome. The rule exists to confine bowlers to essentially the same starting place for deliveries and this is preserved by the new rule.

Furthermore, the new rule presents more opportunities to ‘use the mat.’ This is the practice of changing the position you are standing on the mat to make small adjustments to your final bowl position, so long as you can repeat the previous delivery exactly.

The Number of ‘Seconds’ at Bowls

Regularly you hear lawn bowlers asking from the mat, “How many up/down are we?” Much less often heard, but just as important, particularly if your side has the last bowl, is the question, “How many seconds do we have?”

When you have multiple seconds, you have the opportunity to drive out the opposing shot bowl with the last bowl and collect a multiple count. If you have two or more seconds you can even risk losing one of your own bowls so long as the opposing shot bowl is also removed.

It is usually important that the target shot bowl should be at least even with or behind the jack, because iff you touch the jack your calculation of the expected profit in the count can change dramatically and adversely. If you have two or more seconds and one is a good second you can even consider driving out the opposing shot bowl when the opponents have the last bowl.

It is easier to connect with a bowl than the smaller jack. The probability of making that contact is enhanced if the distance of the jack from the mat is at least medium or most preferably short.

The 14 Meter Block Shot at Lawn Bowls

I have read that 90% of the natural lawn bowling greens in Canada run below 12 seconds. On such slow grass, the aiming angle for a draw shot is tight. With most bowls, one is aiming close to the boundary marker at the front ditch. A bowl that is sitting in the normal draw just 14 meters in front of the mat can block many shots intended to disrupt the head.  Surprisingly in four years of bowling, I had never seen this intentionally attempted.

Last Thursday night at the Etobicoke LBC I was skipping a triples team and when I arrived at the mat for my deliveries my side was holding three close shots with a few other bowls out front, blocking one of the approaches to the head. My opponent had last bowl. Three times I delivered very short bowls just over 14 meters out from the mat. (Any bowl that does not travel at least 14 meters is dead and must be removed from the rink.) The first two of my bowls may have caused the opposing skip to miss his takeout shots. His third bowl hit one of my blockers. The result:-+3 for my side! Furthermore, I didn’t risk damaging the head with my own bowls.

To deliver a bowl just over 14 meters I have found that I simply let my bowling arm hang vertically at my side, place my advancing foot in its normal forward position and then push out the bowl on its intended line without moving either foot. If your normal aim point is the boundary marker, the aim line should be slightly off-center and away from the side of the rink where you want your bowl to finish.

One of the unexpected advantages of such a short blocker is that for many bowlers the blocker is in their field of vision as they look down the rink to their aim point and is an annoying distraction even if the blocker is somewhat misplaced away from the actual draw line.

This tactic only has a chance to work on slow greens where both it is difficult to ’use the mat’ to get around a short bowl and when one side of the rink is already risky for the opposing skip. When these two conditions are not present it is a better play to put your bowls behind the head as ‘catchers’ or cover the respotting position(s).

Jack Strategies for Poor Greens

Throughout the summer in Canada, most of the lawn bowling rinks that I play on are less well maintained than those in Australia or Portugal. This is not surprising. These latter places don’t have a freezing winter to contend with. Whatever.  

An uneven surface favors less skilled players simply because anything that increases the element of luck helps them (or me as the case may be); however, there are aspects of poor rinks that can give extra advantages to a more experienced team that knows what to look for.

On some rinks the two meters closest to the ditches slopes off towards these edges by so much that a bowl that arrives near them almost inevitably continues on into the ditch. An observant team should not ask a lead to deliver jacks to within 4 meters of such front ditches. The reason: better players are more likely than poorer ones to deliver bowls behind the jack and if the jack is close to the front ditch such bowls will be lost.

In utter contrast to the above, there are other rinks that have somewhat of a physical barrier at one and sometimes both ends. Sometimes this is a thin strip of longer grass. Sometimes it is a raised strip of carpet on an older synthetic  green. Sometimes it is an actual strip of wood or metal intended to support the grass but which over time has become higher than the playing surface as a whole. This lip on a rink is usually higher at some places than others.

This lip at the edge of the ditch can be used to improve your control of your team’s preferred jack length. Move the mat up the green so that the distance from the front edge of the mat to the two meter line at the front ditch is precisely what you would like. Then, bowl the jack, aiming it so that if it is long it will encounter this lip at the front ditch. So long as your deliver is at or past the two meter mark and so long as your delivery is not so strong that it jumps over the lip into the gutter, you will end up with the exact length you want once the jack is re-spotted on the T as the rules require.  The protruding lip at the area of the ditch where you have aimed gives your team a reduced likelihood of losing the jack and a correspondingly increased chance to get your most preferred length! 

Comparison of Aero 3.5 Sonic with Taylor 3 Vector VS on Outdoor Synthetic at James Gardens

I just received my new Aero bowls with the indented Z grip. I took them to James Gardens and compared them with my old Vector VS bowls. I can deliver each along the same initial path. My aim point in each case is the number sign on the adjacent rink. At the hog line they have taken the exact same path. If there is a difference in the trajectory at which they enter the head, it is very difficult to detect because the weight of the two deliveries being compared would need to be exact.

What I can say is that my grip is more secure on the Vector VS  because my fingertips can sink into the small circular indents, while with the Z grip it is only skin that enters the zig-zag lines. This was a surprise to me since I thought the indented grooves would help the gripping.

What seems evident though is that for people who palm their bowl as opposed to using some variant of claw grip, the grooves on the Aero bowl will help to stabilize a bowl in their hand.

Divots

In bowls, a divot is a hole in the lightly rooted grass playing surface. Divots characteristically are found at two places. One is immediately at the front of the mat and is caused by dropping the bowl from a few inches to high  during an otherwise good delivery. The other more egregious type arises from a longer throw (not a roll)that bounces about 3 feet out from the front edge of the mat.  Because, in each case, the bowl is not rolling when it hits the green, both damage the playing surface by dragging at it as they slide as they pick up angular momentum. 

All people who release their bowls more than a few inches above the grass surface can make divots but for releases from the same height those who use some variant of the claw grip, with the thumb on the top of the bowl, tend to do more damage than someone who palms the bowl and rolls it off their fingertips. This is because the latter technique provides some rotation as the bowls are released. Tupper even advocates changing to a palm grip in wet weather to protect the green.

Players have different responsibilities for preventing divots. The lead is in charge of placing the mat. Besides the strategic importance of moving the mat up or back to change weight and line, leads are expected to also move the mat as necessary to provide a smooth landing place for the bowls. It is skips’ responsible to order that ground sheets be used if the green is suffering repeatedly damage. 

April Without Bowls

In 1922 T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem The Waste Land, “APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.” April is certainly the cruelest month for Canadian lawn bowlers, such as myself, who have returned from someplace warmer where they could bowl, only to find that again winter is prolonged, the snow has not gone, and temperatures persist around zero Centigrade. My wife Tish and I spent January, February and March in the Algarve (southern Portugal) but had to leave because our landlord there wanted to make use of the condo at Easter and thereafter. The day we got back to Canada was reasonable weather and there was no trace of snow in Toronto but subsequent days have reversed that. If the temperature would only rise another ten degrees, the snow would be melted and the air temperature would be such that I could practice on the synthetic surface at James Gardens. My wife is giving me new bowls this year. I am getting Aeros: 3.5 Heavy Solar Flare Sonics with the Z scoop grip. These are perfected for  rougher, heavier grass greens like we so often encounter in Canada. I will continue to use my black 4.0 Heavy Taylor Vector VS bowls for fast synthetic surfaces like James Gardens and perhaps when leading. I was asked to play skip quite a bit at both Valverde and Vilamoura LBCs over the winter. In Portugal many fewer players have coloured bowls which makes it much slower to read the head in triples and fours. These Solar Flare bowls are yellow with red flecks so I won’t be contributing to the problem at least here in Canada.