Bowling News
The Sports Minister has indicated that he expects all sports to review their rules and look to extend the Three-Calls rule already introduced in an increasing number of competitive sports. The Three-Calls ruling has been introduced with perceived success in a number of sports including cricket and tennis and has been credited with toning down participant appeals and confrontations with match officials.
This rule only allows a set number of appeals (usually three) against decisions by match officials to be made by participants and in cricket and tennis it has served them well and these sports are now being held up as examples of good practice. The Sports Minister has now advocated that all sports ruling bodies should accept such rulings within their sport rules with football being the most targetted sport in the light of growing spectacles of players haranguing match officials.
The directive from the Sports Minister is that all sports must adopt this move as a default within their rules unless they can produce evidence that it is 'counter-productive to the essence of the sport'.
In bowling it is being touted that the Three-Calls would be applied to the call for tapes to be used in the instance of non-agreement on the closest wood and within the Three-Calls per match allowed by each bowler would also include any calls for the long tape to be produced. So each bowler could only ask for a measure including long tape calls a maximum of three times in any one match.
It is getting to a bad state when bowling is compared with football but regardless of that the government is determined to stamp out challenges to match officials that are seen as producing bad examples to the next generation of sportsmen and sportswomen.
One aspect of such an introduction that may appeal to the sports governing bodies is that this rule could see delays to the action being reduced as these bodies continue to look for ways of making their sports more appealing to the younger elements. Whilst we await comments from Sport England and the BCGBA we invite you to share any views on how this could or couldn't possibly work. Please share your view with your fellow bowlers by leaving a Comment at the foot of this posting.
April fool ?
Sorry but measuring is part of the game, to stop an all out war on the green if that be the case why do we need refferies, sometimes the eye can't detect which bowl is on
That's my two penef anyway
Most of us cant even keep the score never mind the number of measures but I suspect its something to do with todays date😀
Is this the most important issue for a government minister!! I have never found it a big issue of an opponent calling for tapes repeatedly.
Occasionally I recognise an opponent calling for tapes to stop/ slow the game down when losing end after end - but no big problem to me.
Philip of Lindley
I think this is a great idea to drag crown green bowling in the the 21st century. Hopefully this will remove the tedium of unnecessary repetitive measuring for the sake of it.
Bob Haigh