Chicken counting

Managing both B and C Teams in the Thursday evening Men's Fours leagues. Been playing mainly for the C Team since they're mostly newish bowlers. But the B Team is in danger of being relegated to the bottom division to join our new-this-season C Team. So over the next few weeks aiming to try and help the B Team stay up.

This evening we're at home to division 3 leaders Somersham B. Hoping to give them a bit of a surprise after our sterling performance in the League Triples.

That's certainly the way it's heading at the halfway point. We're ahead on all three rinks. On rink six the opposition are arguing amongst themselves, a few choice words aimed at their own skip, as they drop seven on one end, the score 18-7. Gets even worse for them, finishing 32-10 to us.

On rink four their players are questioning if we've got our A Team playing against them. They've obviously come expecting to give us a spanking, but it's not going according to their script. Dropping a six, the gap widens even further in our favour. We win 23-18.

Rink five and we're also comfortably cruising to a victory, 16-7 ahead with only four ends to play. Not concerned when we drop four on end eighteen. Still 16-11 ahead with three ends to play, I comment to the opposition skip how a game can turn so quickly, but that we probably only need to win one of the last three ends.

End nineteen we've got the jack surrounded, sitting four up. My number three puts another one in, now five up. But I can see danger, all their bowls sitting a yard behind the jack. Just as I've decided to ask for the next bowl to be defensive, to sit in amongst their back bowls, their number three plays the shot I feared and trails the jack to their back bowls.

They've now got three bowls hard against the back of the jack, another three a foot or so in front. All our bowls are forming a defensive wall a yard or two before that. Mission impossible to get either of my bowls through. Their skip manages to score another on the edge. Dropping seven, we're now 16-18 down!

We do win one of the remaining three ends... the last by one. Lose 17-20. Retire to the clubhouse for a tea of buttered new potatoes, pasty and beans thinking if we'd been offered a 5-2 points victory before the match we'd have happily taken that. But come away feeling we let a 7-0 win slip through our grasp. Thinking positive, the win has probably lifted the B Team off the bottom league position. Here are the scorecards.