SICK AS A GREEN PARROT

Monday 10th June 2024

CHORLEY & DISTRICT LEAGUE DIV-2: Eagle & Child 'A' 147-150 Fox Lane 'A'

v DAVID GREEN L 17-21

In the ladies 20K walking race at the European Athletics Championships in Rome a few days ago, Laura Garcìa-Caro was in third place down the home staight of the arena and grabbed the national flag to wave and drape around her shoulders.
The Spanish lass was all smiles, punching the air with joy at the prospect of a bronze medal.
It's always worth a shoulder check though. Unbeknown to Laura, a Ukrainian athlete Lyudmila Olyanovska was making up significant ground and incredibly claimed the third podium place just a few strides from the line.
Missing out on an athletics championship medal far outweighs losing a bowls match in the second tier of the Chorley & District League (Just!) and at 14-2 up, I definitely wasn't flag waving and know only too well that in this game, you've won nowt at all until you reach 21.
But there may have been a momentary similarity in how Garcia-Caro must have felt as success slipped through her grasp to what was going through my mind after taking a commanding lead before throwing it away. Failing to break David's comeback on seemingly simple, piddly straight peg marks that barely broke the minimum distance was painful submission.
In the aftermath it just felt totally ridiculous that I didn't manage to get in for nine ends and that the match ran away from me.
Lessons learned though in that I should have been aggressive whilst still with a healthy lead and sent some disruptive bowls with more weight. Something would have happened eventually, but instead I kept trying to play the perfect wood, convinced eventually it would come.
An inch out here, an inch out there, a couple of wafer thin measures and yet it just didn't happen.
I just needed to get out of that hole I was in and was confident of taking him anywhere else on the green and finishing the job off, but it wasn't to be. David's run of woods to win were cleverly close but not clustered and so never creating a big, tempting target.
Early on I was playing fine. David however, was nowhere near the player I've seen on many occasions and wasn't getting a length. Those two factors combined meant I flew off in to a big lead quite rapidly.
Having got out of his first attempt at draining me with the short and straight game, I won a couple of ends to move up to seventeen and was holding two more. It was looking like I was back in the driving seat until a fantastic bowl from David proved to be the turning point and his winning run commenced.
Interestingly, the friendly New Zealander can be more parrot than kiwi with a lot to say when he's losing. He doesn't say so much when he's in the ascendancy though. I pointed this out to him later as we scored the same match, to which he chuckled and said he wasn't aware he does that. I can't help thinking there's more to it than he let's on, the wily bugger! To be fair, his behaviour was more an observation than distraction.
It was a sickener to lose the game the way I did, but credit to Mr Green who has been around the block and is well known as a good bowler in these parts. He clawed back very well from twelve down and not even playing well in the beginning.
I felt as though I was the better player on the night, but experience and tactical nouse made the difference in this match.
An absolutely bloody awful night's sleep followed, going over end after end in my head. In fact I didn't sleep much at all, and when I did I kept waking up from bloody awful bowling dreams!
My capitulation contributed towards a narrow defeat for the team. Four winners each, Fox Lane took the local bragging rights by just three chalks.