Bowls: NZ women's pair takes gold

MANCHESTER - New Zealand's Sharon Sims and Jo Edwards won the women's pairs gold medal at the Commonwealth Games today.

They beat South Africa's Eilen Cawker and Jill Hackland 22-12 on a rain-soaked Heaton Park greens.

"I'm absolutely thrilled. The dream has come true," said Sims, a 50 year-old quality manager from Palmerston North.

"We were under pressure early, but we never panicked. We just kept patient. We hung in there and things started to go our way. We kept it together on the longer ends."

Thirty-two year-old skip Edwards, a Nelson factory hand, said the victory in her first Games for New Zealand had yet to sink in.

"It probably won't for a few hours," she said, just before she was awarded her medal -- the New Zealand bowlers' first.

The pair showed again that they play well under pressure.

For the third time in the tournament, they staged a comeback after South Africa galloped off to 6-1 lead by the fifth end and led 8-3 after seven. But as the rain teemed down, the New Zealand pair picked up five in the eighth and rattled off 19 shots in all without response so that, as the sun re-emerged at the end of the game, the South African's conceded with an end to play.

Today's medal for double world champion Sims and Edwards brightened the final result for the bowls team after they had earlier been rocked by the sending home in disgrace of disabled bowler John Davies for sexually harassing a Games volunteer.

The bowls team finished with one gold, and three bronzes -- from singles players Mike Kernaghan and Marlene Castle and the women's four of Wendy Jensen, Patsy Jorgensen, Jan Khan and Anne Lomas.

While the result was well short of initial expectations, it easily bettered the record of the team at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Games where Millie Khan, Jan's mother, won a solitary bronze.

The women bowlers largely lived up to expectations but the men did not. The vaunted pair of Russell Meyer and Paul Girdler failed to make it through a seemingly simple round of section play and the equally fancied men's four of Andrew Curtain, Rowan Brassey, Sean Johnson and Peter Belliss dropped out in the quarterfinals.

Keeping the flag up for the men was Dunedin sports manager Kernaghan, but his grudge match quarterfinal win over Australia's Steve Glasson was highly contentious.

In scenes unprecedented in bowls at this level, both players and managers were warned twice by English umpire Michael Roberts before he "burnt" a crucial Glasson bowl that effectively cost the Australian the match.

Glasson stormed off the rink close to tears and Australia's team manager Geoff Oakley made a formal complaint against Roberts and warned "there will be blood on the floor" if any New Zealanders came into the press centre while he was there.

Edwards, who is young for a bowler, said she had used her lack of international experience to her advantage. It allowed her to ignore the reputation of her opponents and to focus on her own game.

She took up bowls 10 years ago when numbers in her chosen sport of softball were dwindling.

Sims, who listens to Ministry of Sound chill-out discs between matches to relax, partly attributed their win to preparation they did on an East Tamaki, Auckland, green that was specially developed to ape England's slow and tacky greens.

She said it made a huge difference in the rain-affected semifinal and final.

Despite much rain through the last half of the tournament that caused the some rinks to muddy up, Sims said the greens played well in the last two rounds.

- NZPA

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