Silver Salver Scrapped?

Post date: Feb 5, 2019 3:59:57 PM

The annual two legged battle for the seemingly much un-coveted Silver Salver with that lot down the road among the tulip fields continues to become more farcical each year. Upon arrival at the Spalding stronghold on Sunday our fired-up for a revenge leader, Maggie Holden, was greeted with “we can’t find the salver, and we’re not too bothered as our chairman is reluctant to pay out to get it engraved.” Maggie’s smiling reply of “Oh dear.” was really meant to be “In that case I wish I stayed at home and had a kip in my summerhouse.”

A similar remark was made by Jeanette Bourne on rink six, “He’d be better off on the allotment”, after husband Jeff, skipped their rink, failed to save them dropping five on the eighteenth end. Another tricky moment was when Judy Childs was told, she wasn’t playing with husband Adrian and she burst into tears...of laughter! Ken White also set the imagination reeling when he declared his secret passion was modelling. Everyone lost interest when he clarified it was making model trains.

So what about the match, which is really what we were there for...some of us anyway, others debatable. We were 22 shots down after the first leg at home, so all each rink had to do was win by three point something shots and the salver was ours. So it’s twenty one ends or two hours fifty minutes.

After six ends we were 32-19 down, don’t panic! After twelve we’re hanging in now only 61-57 down thanks mainly to the rinks of the reliable, Jill Goode and former regular Kevin Vinter, returning with leads of 15-5 and 12-6 respectively. One of the highlights of the match was the fact that Kevin who has been playing in shorts all winter found his long trousers in the bottom of his wardrobe, put them on, and would you believe it the sun came out, well outdoors anyway. Indoors, after eighteen ends the lights had started to dim we were down 100-87. The last three ends saw us score one more shots than them overall, taking the final score to a reasonably respectable 111-99.

As a consolation we did win four out of the six rinks and as captain Maggie said in her commiseration after dinner speech “At least we won’t have to clean the trophy” to which their captain replied “We’ve looked everywhere and still can’t find it”. That’s bowls !

D.S.