Lots of buzz at the club for our first match of the outdoor season, a friendly triples against Haddenham. I played lead bowl for one of our teams.
We lost our rink but won the match. Unfortunately it was a pretty varied performance on my part. Delivered far too many wobbly bowls, which fell short. Sorted that by bending closer to the green.
My biggest problem at present? It takes me half a game to find the right line. Once I do, most of my bowls land within three feet of the jack. But a failure to quickly find the right markers to aim at means I'm all over the place for too many early ends. I've just counted last year's singles friendlies and competition matches. In 14 out of 18 I got off to a slow start and was struggling to catch up. That's almost 80%... unbelievable!
Think what I'm doing is trying to find both the right line and length from the start. So I'm adjusting the line to correct the length, and on the very next end changing the length to correct the line. Completely wrong! Result? I fail to sort out either quickly enough.
So in my next match (friendly singles on Wednesday afternoon) I'm going to simply focus on getting the right line. Once that's sorted I can think about the length.
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Pardon me if I'm wrong but surely the bowls in England are no different from those in the rest of the world; the glory of the engineering of any lawn bowl is that length and line are independent! I was taught you do not correct line by changing weight and vice versa. Line is a function of angle only, not weight. Weight is a function of bowl speed leaving your hand and not delivery angle.
ReplyDeleteYou're not wrong, Clarke. Line and length ARE independent of each other. But subconsciously I think I'm trying to sort both at the same time. What I should be doing is using the first few bowls to fix the marker, then focus specifically on length thereafter. I'll let you know what happens on Wednesday in the next post! Regards, John
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