NAIROBI, Kenya, Jul 20 – The national lawn bowl team is hopeful their one-month residential camp will be enough to aid a progression to the knockout stages of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Team manager Mumo Musembi said time is ripe for the team to qualify from the group stages, having first competed at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
“We are going to Birmingham to try and qualify for the knockout stages. We have been competing in the Commonwealth since 1998, and we are yet to make the knockout stages. We got very close and on the African stage the biggest nation is South Africa who have won multiple Commonwealth gold medals and so have Zimbabwe,” Musembi said.
He is counting on the fact that Kenya beat bigwigs South Africa in the last competitive action between the two sides.
“In the last competitive competition in Africa we defeated the South African singles champion. So we are able to play at the top level but we still need to put in a bit of investment to get right at the top table,” he said.
However, Musembi says he is aware that the Club Games are a different ball game and many teams are expected to bring their A-game in bid for medals.
“We know who we are playing in the pools, so our gentleman will be pooled with Australia and South Africa, ladies have their opponents and of course the seeding is done based on previous performance. We are seeded in our pool in position three and position four because that’s where we finished the last time,” Musembi said.
“As you can see in Commonwealth Games 2018, our lady player Eunice (Mbugua) finished third in her pool and just missed out by a very short margin of making the quarters,” he added.
The bowlers have been training for the past one month at Karen Country Club, Nairobi Club and the Moon Country Club in Njoro.
Speaking at the same time, Mbugua exalted the training regime, noting it has worked wonders for her game.
“I am now able to access the green or the field as a result of this training camp. The weather has also helped a lot, allowing us to train during the day,” she said.
Also part of the team is Cephas Kimwaki who started playing 12 years ago and is looking forward to making his Commonwealth bow.
“I am ready because I have been training for a month. I started playing at Limuru Country Club and while maintaining the green over there, I took the opportunity to build myself. I am looking forward to a great outing in Birmingham,” Kimwaki said.
Lawn bowls is played on a grass pitch – also known as a green – which is about 40 metres by 40 metres.
Each green contains seven playing sections whereas each team has four playing woods (balls) which they try to get as close as possible to a white ball called the Jack.
The Jack is placed about 23 metres from the players who roll the wood to see who is closest to the former.
For every wood that is closer than any of the opponent’s wood, a point is scored. The maximum points is four and the minimum is one point.
They are tallied on a scoreboard and the players go up and down 18 times; at the end of 18 times, the person with the most points wins the game.
