New Indoor season starts at Bowls Club with Drawn Pairs competition

Attracting 66 bowlers playing a knock-out competition over five rounds, the winners were Jose Isaacs and Ian Clark who beat Wayne Smith and Richard Allam by 57 points to 43 in the final. Isaacs and Clark had the easier route through the previous rounds with wins of 20, 40, 20 and 20 points, compared with Smith and Allam’s progress of wins by 22, 8, 6 and 4 points. Thanks go to the sponsors Duckworth’s and the club’s Bonus Ball, and to Mark Brown and Carol Dowse for organising the event.

The new Night League competition is now well under way after playing the first three rounds. In the Orchard Health Group First Division, last year’s champions and runners-up, Holland Fen and Invaders, have both made perfect starts to the new campaign, taking the maximum of 18 points from their games.

Holland Fen played strongly to beat A40, Nomads and Royal Mail convincingly with an average shot advantage of over 40 shots per game. Invaders have been in charge in each of their matches against Nomads, Optimists and A40, but without the heavy scoring achieved by Holland Fen.

IBC and Strollers have started well and are close behind in third and fourth. IBC beat both Breakaways and Parthians 6-0, having control of the games on each rink. They shared the points 3-3 against Golfers, for whom David Marshall’s rink won well by 27-18.

Strollers took all the points against Golfers, winning one of the rinks 23-18 having started slowly to trail 4-16 at the half-way point.Against Dynamics and Breakaways, they won 4-2, with good wins on one rink in each match, 32-7 against Dynamics and 30-11 against Breakaways.

Dynamics have made a solid start to the season to be in fifth place, taking six points against Parthians, four off Golfers and two against Strollers. Graham Wilkinson’s rink, with Pam Rate and Seamus Rooney, have won all three of their games 27-10, 18-14 and 18-17.

Newly promoted Optimists took two points in their opening game against Royal Mail, winning one rink 25-20, lost both rinks against Invaders, then dominated the game with Nomads, winning 21-10 and 20-11.

In Cammacks Division Two, the early leaders are Woodpeckers, after taking six points off both Vikings and Phantoms and four points from Amateurs.

Desperados have played twice, winning both convincingly 6-0 against Shipmates and Kingfishers.

Hotspurs, relegated from Division One last season, are just behind in third. They were beaten 0-6 in their first match against Phantoms, in spite of starting well on both rinks, then took five points against Burtons and all six against Amateurs.

Just two points separate the next five teams after each have had inconsistent starts to the campaign, with Kingfishers in fourth, Phantoms, fifth, Vectors, sixth, Amateurs, seventh and Vikings, ninth.