Our match on Sunday marked three firsts. It was our first away match of the season, our first ever visit to play Thame (outdoors) and it was the first time that John Jenkins had played for Winslow. Thame is a lawn bowls and tennis club which has a very impressive new clubhouse and a number of floodlit tennis courts adjacent to the bowling green. We received a warm welcome from captain Bill and the other members of Thame before kicking off our 18 end match.

The match proved to be a rather strange affair

  • one of our rinks won by a large margin.

  • a second rink raced into a commanding 10+ shot lead before being pegged back to a very close finish but they held on for a win

  • a third rink fell behind by 10+ shots but fought back over the last few ends to minimise their loss

  • the fourth rink had a close game but were never seriously in trouble of losing and won 4 of the last 5 ends for a solid win

  • and our final rink were behind all game but also won 4 of the last 5 ends to minimise their defeat

Winslow won on 3 of the 5 rinks with an overall score of 84:67 giving us a 17 shot win (with 15 of those shots coming in the last 3 ends).

The highest wining rink was certainly not as close as it has been in recent weeks with John Gilbey, Robin and John Jenkins winning by 20 shots. Congratulations to all three of them, a great start to his Winslow bowling career for John Jenkins and I hope he keeps up his 100% winning record for many weeks to come.

My thanks go to Kay for being on standby as our unused reserve this week and also to John T for taking up the challenge of playing his first game as Skip while I have been captain.

Thanks and well done to everyone involved in another enjoyable afternoon of bowls.

Jef Cawdell