Why your bowls keep going narrow — the four real causes

You deliver, it looks lovely off the hand, and then it just... keeps going. Straight through the head, past the jack on the inside, into the ditch or up against the bank. Your skip says nothing, which is worse than if they did.

Narrow is the most common fault in club bowls, and it is also the most commonly misdiagnosed. Most bowlers respond by widening their aiming point — taking more green — and that works for about three ends before the whole thing falls apart, because widening the line treats the symptom and not the cause.

There are four causes. Work through them in this order, because they're listed from most likely to least.

1. Too much weight (this is 60% of narrow bowls)

A bowl doesn't bend because it's magic. It bends because the bias only takes over once the bowl slows down enough for it to matter. Early in its run, momentum wins and the bowl travels close to straight. Late in its run, momentum fades and the bias drags it across.

So a bowl with too much weight spends too long in the straight part of its life and not enough time in the bending part. It runs out of green before it runs out of speed. It finishes narrow.

This is why "take more green" fails as a fix. If your weight is wrong, widening the line just means you now miss on a wider arc — you'll be narrow and through the head.

How to tell it's this one: your narrow bowls also finish long. If you're consistently finishing a metre past the jack on the inside, it's weight, not line. If you're finishing level with the jack but a metre inside it, skip to cause 2.

The fix — the four-mat drill. Put the jack at a comfortable medium length. Deliver four bowls trying to make each one finish short of the jack by roughly half a metre. Not at the jack. Short. Most bowlers who've been running narrow will find their "short" bowls finish dead level with the jack, which tells you exactly how much weight you've been carrying. Do this for ten minutes before you practise anything else. Weight control is the foundation; line is decoration.

2. Your aiming point is a guess

Ask a bowler where they're aiming and a surprising number will say "at the jack" or "a bit wide of the jack." That's not an aiming point. The jack is 23 metres away and roughly the size of a mandarin. You cannot aim consistently at a mandarin.

You aim at something on the bank — a fence post, a sponsor's sign, the join between two boards, a specific letter on the advertising hoarding. Something fixed, high enough to see, that does not move when the head changes.

The fix: during your trial ends, deliver two bowls on each hand and watch where the bowl crossed the halfway point of the rink, not where it finished. That crossing point tells you the shape of the arc. Then pick the bank marker that lines up with it and use that same marker for every bowl on that hand for the rest of the game. When the green speeds up in the afternoon sun, you move the marker one sign across. You don't re-guess from scratch every end.

3. You're delivering across your body

Here's the one nobody tells club bowlers, because it's invisible from the inside.

If your shoulders are square to your aiming line but your step goes somewhere else — or your shoulders are open and your arm swings across your chest to compensate — the bowl leaves your hand travelling on a line that's tighter than the one you aimed. Your eyes did their job. Your body overruled them.

The tells:

• Your bowls are narrow on one hand only. A body-alignment fault is almost always hand-specific, because your body is not symmetrical.
• Your delivery arm brushes your trouser leg on one hand and not the other.
• Your last step lands across the line rather than down it.

The fix — the string drill. Lay a length of string or a chalk line from the mat down the aiming line you've chosen. Set up so your feet, hips and shoulders are all square to that string. Deliver without a bowl a few times, watching your stepping foot land on the line. Then add the bowl. The goal is for your hand to release the bowl directly over the line, with the arm swinging under the shoulder, not across the chest.

Ten minutes of this fixes more narrow bowls than an hour of aiming-point fiddling — but only after you've ruled out weight, because heavy bowls make good alignment look broken.

4. The green isn't the green you think it is

Greens are not uniform. The same rink can be a foot wider on one hand than the other. The centre of a green often runs faster than the edges because that's where everyone bowls. A green that ran 14 seconds in the morning shade can be running 15 by three in the afternoon, and 15-second greens need noticeably more green than 14-second ones.

If your bowls started finishing narrow partway through a game, and nothing about your delivery changed, this is your culprit. The green sped up and you didn't move with it.

The fix: treat your aiming marker as a dial, not a setting. Every time the head tells you you're finishing consistently narrow, move one marker wider and commit to it for a full end before judging. Bowlers who adjust mid-end, bowl by bowl, never gather enough information to know what's actually happening.

Diagnosing it in one end

Next time you play, watch where each bowl finishes relative to the jack and write down two things: short/level/long, and narrow/on/wide.

Four ends of that is more useful than four weeks of vague dissatisfaction.

The uncomfortable bit

Cause 3 is the one that holds most club bowlers back for years, and it's the one you cannot diagnose yourself, because you are inside the delivery. You feel like you're going straight down the line. Everyone does. The camera disagrees with almost everybody the first time.

Get someone to film you from directly behind the mat, on both hands, three bowls each. Watch it back at quarter speed. If your stepping foot crosses the line, you've just found the thing that's been costing you two shots a game.