League AGM

Come away from this evening's men's league AGM somewhat annoyed. Should be a positive experience, being the first event looking towards the 2017 outdoor season. Anything but. Bit like herding a bag of frogs. The chairman and secretary have at best a tenuous hold on proceedings.

There's one suggestion to change ends played to eighteen in May and August, twenty-one for June and July. At present both captains agree how many to play before the match starts. Made the mistake of playing to 21 in the last game of the 2016 season. Could hardly see the jack towards the end.

There's an alternative suggestion tabled to play 18 ends throughout the season. The chairman is only going to allow a vote on that plus the status quo before someone points out we should include the original suggestion and vote on all three. So we do, and the majority go for 18 ends all season. Sure we're going to feel short changed when matches finish about 8.30pm in June and July.

I had a change tabled as a result of the situation mentioned last year in fair weather bowlers. The secretary's introduction to the topic started with a nasty dig at my original email along the lines of "the writer of this email makes a bit of an assumption in wording his request 'we expected to win seven points.'" Maybe I could have used better phrasing and said 'we hoped to', but no need to have a go. Think he has some connection to the club I was appealing against. That team was never penalised, the secretary saying to me a few weeks later some rubbish about 'we don't want to encourage legal action against us'. Bit of a joke.

Someone suggested since the defaulting club collected a penalty of minus seven points, the innocent club should be awarded those seven points. Then rushed to a vote on that proposal or the status quo. Didn't even vote on my change. By then I'd lost the will to live. The majority went with  awarding seven points. An even worse position than the current one!