County Fours

Our Oyster team played a side from Folkestone in the 4th round at Folkestone on 23rd February.

Oyster:
Ian Honnor
Charles Bruder
Joe Kelly
Dex Weyand

Folkestone:
Paul Gallagher
Adam Melloy
Scott Manning
Jason Avery

Our Oyster side started off slowly trying to get to grip with a rink that wasn’t playing its usual self (which the home side agreed with) but they got off to the better start.
Folkestone took an early lead. Score being 7-5 after 8 ends. With the Oyster team finally getting to grips with the rink, they got back to 9-9 and started to have better success with long jacks. There were some good battles throughout the game with there opposing players – but crucially it came down to the skips of each team to convert shots.
Oyster started to move ahead and looked at one stage they were one end away from winning, but the Folkestone team rallied and with shorter jack lengths started to pick up points – and a comeback looked on the cards. The game ended up going down to the wire, to the final end, with Oyster 1 point up. The head built up in Oysters favour and with little else to play with his final bowl, Jason Avery had to spring the jack to the left with perfect weight to hold shot. As expected he played the perfect bowl to get the jack moving and held one shot which would make a draw (and an extra end would have been played). Dex had the final bowl of the end and had to draw within 18 inches on an off centre jack, which didn’t look easy, but he stepped up and played the perfect bowl to clinch a tight victory. A great game to watch and played to a very high standard.
Report by Paul Causer.