Women’s bowling elevated to new plane

Sunday’s Mallow Contracts Queen of the Roads final at Ballincurrig elevated women’s bowling to a whole new plane.

Carmel Ryan won what may be the best women’s score ever, but in defeat Silke Tulk enhanced her reputation too.

Ryan and Tulk are both current European champions, so the standard of the bowling should not have been a surprise. What was astonishing though was the latter half of this contest. Each one threw bowls that would have killed another opponent. The mental exhaustion of both players at the line was testimony to the scale of the physical and psychology battle this became.