Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Clueless 15 d Shanes 9

The Bowling Shanes are an enigma. The Bowling Shanes are to lawn bowls what cold pizza is to breakfast. The Bowling Shanes are a lucky dip. You can never step into the same Bowling Shanes twice.

We went out hard and eked out an early lead with some loose but adequate bowling. Then the underrated Clueless combo started to click. Their slow-talking no 1 was outpointing Dave. Paul was bowling a fine line and length but Margaret (age 67) was just shading him every time. She was like Glenn McGrath, a bowling metronome. Often her two bowls ended up cheek-by-jowl. Their 3rd man was giving me a lawn bowls lesson, and when they occasionally strayed into trouble, their silently sinister skip would eerily pilot his bowl to just where it was needed, leaving our valiant leader no space to work his magic.

I got my bias wrong twice and watched helplessly as my 4 and 15/16ths went sailing across neighbouring greens. I'm proposing we introduce a fine [like perhaps five star jumps] for this, but since I'm the only one who ever does I'm not proposing it very hard.

In compensation I did deliver the bowl of the evening, getting into an impossible spot to steal an end that looked sewn up for Clueless. Over the next hour Margaret said "gosh, that was a nice bowl" maybe six times. I let the cat out of the bag when I admitted that the jack was nowhere near where I had thought it was, so it was entirely accidental.

Clueless ran away with the fixture and were comprehensively the better team on the day. Hats off, but as our skip always says, bowling was the real winner.

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