I don’t know that I’ve got much to write about last Thursday’s game against the Ups&Downs, except that it was full of them.  And there were more Daddy Long Legs flying around than pins, for the Almonds at any rate. 

It was quite curious that even though I was The Chosen One our Craptain turned to for getting the game going (as he was going to be late), I got to do no such thing as both Orical & Compact found this delegated responsibility too difficult to accept and proceeded to commandeer my authority.  Which is probably why I didn’t play very well, my confidence being once more undermined and compromised. 

Without so much as a courteous check that I was happy with the arrangement, Compact put me down to play first with Turk as my unfortunate accomplice.  I somehow managed to scrape 17 and thanks to Turk’s 23 we actually had the Almonds in front by 6 pins prior to Barnesy & Taffy squandering this lead during their own stint. 

To be fair, Barnesy was handicapped by Chuckle1 trying to confuse her by telling her it wasn’t her turn when it actually was, and she still managed to get 8 on the board for us.  As for Taffy, well I’m not sure what caused his 14, but I do know that as a result of the 2^nd pairing scores we found ourselves 23 down.  This Up&Down lead was halved after Compact and aRCee each Pontooned on 21: after watching another trio blister down the alley Orical mused that Compact was throwing his balls a little too slowly, when in reality if he’d thrown them any harder he’d have been splitting wood, not just hitting it. 

Unfortunately, Jocky & Orical were unable to sustain or improve upon our position, dropped 18 pins between them and left us 30 down on the game after adding a 13 & 20 respectively to the board.  I have to admire Jocky’s shrugging off of missing the pins by describing these throws as ‘looseners’, although no matter how good natured he was he still got told to “get off”. 

Having disappeared for taxi duty, Barnesy delegated the filling in of the scorebook to Wiggle, and it didn’t escape my notice that neither Orical nor Compact jumped in to relieve me of that particular duty.  Hammer, it would appear, is still determined to make a nuisance of himself, this week by taking an unhealthy interest in the scores I was keeping.  I lost count of the number of times I tried to get rid of him by asking him to go find out what the scores on the main scoreboard were, but he didn’t get the hint and like a bad penny he kept coming back.  What with trying to swat unsolicited attention from him as well as the Daddy Long Legs, it’s not surprising I didn’t notice the Barnesy legacy of a wrongly noted score until it was way too late…  I didn’t realise she had a sneaky streak, but even though I made yet another right old mess in the scorebook, at least we had an accurate record in the finish.  The wrong result and not what we strived for, but accurate.

Craptain has obviously decided that Hammer & Sparky are a force to be reckoned with as he hat-tricked their pairing this week.  Hammer got 28 up on the board whilst Sparky scored a more modest 22 – he never enlightened us to any ‘bed thoughts’ this week, and generally it looks like the whole ‘Pussy’ excitement has piqued, (although, out of context with the Almonds but in a parallel skittles universe, I was privy to another ‘pussy’ pun that made me laugh out loud – I’d share it with you, but I don’t think it would pass the censors ), but at least I know one person bothered to read the MR last week, (in which I used the best introductory line ever and it has been wasted on you bunch of heathens), as Sparky indignantly pointed out that he HAD said goodbye last week we were just all too ignorant to take any notice.  Did anyone notice him go this week??

With our penultimates clawing back a measly 5 pins, Craptain & Chuckle1 were left with the challenge of pulling back 26 pins to give us a win.  Our Craptain did his level best with another high scoring turn of 33, pulling back 12 of those on his own, but Chuckle1 let the side down a bit, not pulling his weight let alone any pins, so that we had to concede defeat by 17 to the increasingly loud and guffawing Up-yours & Downs.

Our next opportunity for glory comes Tuesday 26/9 at home against West Sports – see you all there!  And, DON'T FORGET - fixture for the Knockout Cup w/c 9/10 is THURSDAY 12^TH OCTOBER, on our home alley against the Muller Road Rebels.