This title could also be:

The first time I’ve ever scored more than 11 shots at Kardinya

Or

The first time I’ve ever had a rink lead at any stage of a match at Kardinya

Or

The first time I’ve finished within 20 shots of Kardinya at Kardinya.

I say that in all seriousness, because my 3 previous appearances at Kardinya prior to Saturday resulted in a 10-32 defeat, an 8-31 defeat, and an 11-34 defeat.

They call it the Kattery, but it’s more like an Abattoir, and that bloody tarpaulin they put over the green gives you vertigo while they slowly disembowel you end by end.

So the story goes that after spending the entire season up until now in the Premier League side, I found myself travelling to Kardinya with the Division 1 White team to take on Kardinya’s top team, who were/are 2 games clear on top of the ladder, even after failing to win an aggregate in January, and needless to say my hopes were low.

How I wound up playing 1 White instead of a Friday night under lights in Premier against Mt Lawley will be left a mystery to the reader, because I wasn’t dropped due to form…

But it involves my sister.

So long story short, I was now playing with Shane Adams, Larry Herbert (aka Stiffy, brother of Floppy) and Ronnie Ker (I have teamed up with Ron’s son Peter throughout the season), and we got to Kardinya, were drawn against Steve Novak’s rink (Who had handed my rink the 8-31 defeat last February)….

And we promptly dropped 4 shots on the first end, and I was left to think:

Then we hit back and recovered 3 shots on the next end thanks to Larry kicking the jack to the right, and from there it was just as steady as she goes, as we took the lead on the third end (5-4), which is just about the first time I’ve ever led a rink at Kardinya, and never trailed for the rest of the afternoon as we buried the Kats under the weight of good bowls…

To demonstrate this fact, after 7 ends we led 8-7, and after 13 ends we led 21-7, as Kardy’s back end of Novak and Beau McGrechan proved you don’t have to be dead to be stiff…

I think the best example of this was on the 11th End when we were only holding 1 (Larry’s bowl), which was our only bowl in the head, and had a formed a nest of 4 bowls tucked in a metre behind waiting for a trail from Shane…

Well, Shane didn’t really get close to trailing it, but Steve agreed with his teammates to go at the bowl and try to make 4 or 5.

He did, but his only problem was he made 4 for Manning, because he missed the bowl and kicked the jack back to exactly the spot we wanted Shane to kick it to.

So thanks to moments like that, combined with the aforementioned sheer weight of good bowls from the front 3, we raced out to lead 21-7, there was a brief revival from Kardy when they cut the lead back from 21-7 to 21-11 on the 14th and 15th ends, but we got those shots back and led 26-11 after 19 ends, then narrowly lost consecutive measures to end the game to ultimately win 26-13, ending one of my personal hoodoos as I finally won a bloody rink at Kardinya.

Just briefly, there was a point in the game where the wind got so strong that the cover was pushed down to no more than a metre from my head.

And, to my amazement, a 13-shot victory was ultimately enough to win the drinks vouchers for that Saturday of pennants at Manning, because the next closest win was a 9 shot win in Division 3 by Ross Dolton, and Division 5 by Richard ‘Half’ Price, who will tell you his third Grahame Maples cost the rink several shots due to shoddy measuring.

Unfortunately though, in the grander scheme of the aggregate, we ultimately lost 80-94 as the middle two rinks got smashed in the final 1/3rd of their games, and ‘we’ did check the aggregate after reaching the 14-end marker, and we were ahead 65-61 after 56 ends and taking it right up to the runaway leaders…

Sadly though, it all unravelled quickly and painfully, as Sam Perica’s rink went from trailing 20-23 to dropping 13 shots in 4 ends, going on to lose 22-37, and Wayne Heldt’s rink went from trailing 12-14 to dropping 14 unanswered shots in 6 ends, going on to lose 13-28 against Matty Allen, which our rink simply couldn’t cover off.

Still, the other positive was we did get another rink point thanks to Paul Smith’s crew coming through to win 19-16 against Daryl Radford’s team, after trailing 9-15 after 12 and keeping the home team to just 1 shot in the final 10 ends, which makes us the first team in 1 White to get 2 points off Kardinya at Kardinya this season.

Have a look at Brad Hogg scoring in Roman numerals… no wonder they didn’t know what the aggregate was.

But yeah, I actually won a bloody rink at Kardinya.