Twelve months ago, myself and Kallum Taylor made the trip to play croquet, embarrassing ourselves at one of the most gentlemanly of sports. Nevertheless my coaching tips worked, as Kallum helped York surge to victory in the much vaunted Roses croquet clash. This year, though, croquet has been dropped, and in its place comes the inaugural lawn bowls competition, in which our YUSU President will be representing our fine institution.
As a result we decided that an important crash course session in the tactics of lawn bowls was required, however somehow that plan failed miserably and instead after an arduous journey we ended up playing pool in the Lounge, which, crucially, I won. A long week of hard searching for a bowls set came to nothing, and much to our dismay we had to scrap our original plan.
Who would have thought that no one in York would have a set? We were counting on Simon Varley who usually possesses every piece of sporting equipment you could imagine, but this was beyond even his powers. So instead we decided to play darts, apart from the fact we then trawled around every campus bar unable to find a darts board which actually had some darts.
The closest we got was a single dart in the Lounge, and knowing mine and Kallum’s darts skills that was probably a good thing, as we might have been stuck there for the long haul trying to hit that tantalising winning double, if we even made it that far. So after all of the build-up to bowls and then darts, we finally had to settle down for a nice relaxed game of pool.
Kallum then made it worse by cajoling me into breaking my self-enforced Roses drinking ban, by being far too kind and buying me a pint, and as punishment I had to beat him at pool. If we lose at Roses now, I know who will be getting the blame.
It would be fair to say Kallum has an unorthodox pool playing style, with his strange mannerisms, awkward looking grip and one eye closed approach, but it worked off the break as he potted a red into the middle-left pocket.
Things went downhill for Kallum though from there as ten minutes and seven yellow balls later I was onto the black, and our YUSU President still had six reds remaining.
Through pure concentration and a large chunk of brute force, Kallum reduced the arrears with two immaculate pots, but after two lifelines on the black, I wasn’t going to miss for a third time, as I sank the black to seal a momentous victory.
A fun, relaxed game of pool was over, Kallum spent the next five minutes chasing around his remaining four reds, and our sporting spotlight journey was over. With both a University club and a thriving college league, pool is easily accessible for everyone, or you can simply head along to one of the campus bars as we did for a leisurely game.
Our pool skills may have improved ever so slightly, but at bowls we are no better. The question is whether that will prove costly for Kallum come Sunday, we will have to find out…
Cool story bro.
Reads like it’s straight from your diary.