Confused

Come away from this evening's friendly singles match highly frustrated and confused. My first singles loss of the season. No small loss either, 9-21. No shame in losing to my pairs partner and Men's A Team lead, Geoff. He's a good bowler. Just should have done much better.

Was no nearer to finding the line at the end of the match than I was at the beginning. On either hand, either rink direction. How can it be that after delivering 76 bowls I'm so far wide of the mark?

Could say the bowls weren't kind to me. When successfully nudging Geoff's shot bowl, always seemed to hit the wrong side or not put enough effort behind the delivery to make any difference. My high points were drive shots on seperate ends to move Geoff's bowl resting right up against the jack. Accurate in both cases, without any success. Killed one end, the other still left Geoff with shot bowl. Sadly, all sounds like a losing bowler's excuses.

When I did get back the jack delivery on end ten, moved the mat right up the green to upset Geoff's line. Bingo! Four to me. Not really all that great. My bowls were a couple of feet or more from the jack. Just that Geoff's were even further away. Next end back to the same routine. Geoff would get at least one bowl up close, often two. Mine just not near enough.

Need to try something different. After waxing lyrical in Focusing on the line, clearly my method of using a secondary aiming point part way up the green isn't working consistently enough. Great if there's a well-defined marker. But during this match there was nothing I could easily fix upon. Maybe the strong sunlight had something to do with it, washing out the colours on the green and making it harder to pick out something distinctive enough. Possibly a problem as the sun sinks lower in the sky and shades on the green change.

Whatever the reason, something must change. Need to try what everyone else seems to do and use a marker at the end of the green. Tried it before and didn't work for me. Maybe now I've stopped adjusting everything about my delivery and settled on a consistent routine, this is the last adjustment I need to make.

Here's the scorecard, and below that the singles performance this season so far.