Comm Games: Silver for bowls trio

The Kiwi trio of Barry Wynks, Mark Noble and Lynda Bennett collected New Zealand's third medal on Glasgow's greens. Photo / Getty

In front of the stunning backdrop of Kelvingrove Art Gallery, New Zealand's bowlers settled for silver in the open triples B6/B7/B8 competition.

The Kiwi trio of Lynda Bennett, Barry Wynks and Mark Noble were beaten 13-11 by South Africa as they collected New Zealand's third medal on Glasgow's greens.

Noble played a two-point shot that pulled his team-mates back into contention in the penultimate round, but his move came too late as gold went to South Africa.

"Wining the gold would have been fantastic, and it sort of feels like a loss," said Wynks. "It wasn't a good result but it was great to get to this stage and compete for the gold medal.

"We had our usual super slow start. Very rarely in our last 15 Test matches have we got off to a good start and it was usual again. We were 7-1 down and clawed our way back to 7-7, but then it was just ones and twos for the rest of the game.

"Mark played an absolute screamer with his last bowl, but then their skip played an absolute screamer with his last bowl. That was the winning and losing of the game."

New Zealand had hoped to come away with a gold in the final days of competition. Shannon McIlroy was the last man standing but the Gisborne youngster was knocked out in the semi-finals, losing 21-10 to Canada's Ryan Webster.

He will now compete in the bronze medal match but - having beaten England's Sam Tolchard convincingly in the quarter finals - McIlroy revealed the wet conditions hampered his performance.

"The ground was a bit sticky after the previous games, so it was hard to get any finish on the bowls," said McIlroy.

"I'm a little bit disappointed but now I just have to get myself up for the bronze medal match. My initial target was just to get out of my group, so it will be nice to win a bronze medal. Obviously everybody wants to be in the gold medal match but only two people can be there and I'm not one of them."

Away from the show greens, Kiwi duo Joe Edwards and Val Smith also crashed out in their quarter final of the women's pairs, suffering a 14-10 defeat at the hands of Northern Ireland.