Final anguish for Coppinger as slip proves costly

 

After last weekend’s All-Ireland bowling series in Eglish, Colm Rafferty, Hannah Cronin, Paul Rafferty, Andrew O’Leary, Megan O’Reilly, Eoghan McVeigh and Fionán Twohig are all champions on Cloud-9, but their seven opponents, all of whom are provincial champions, will be feeling less happy despite an otherwise spectacular 2024.

That sharp divide between win and lose is night and day, but often as thin as a sheet of paper, or for Noah Lyles five-thousandths of a second for a 100m gold medal. 

In the men’s senior final, Martin Coppinger slipped playing his fourth bowl. The wet road was like an ice-rink in places. That slip meant his bowl was directed onto the right bank. It was so short that he needed two more throws to open Kelly’s bend, which pushed him from being level to almost two shots behind.

He recovered and produced three of the biggest shots in All-Ireland history, but they just brought him back level. What might have happened had he been level before those three shots? 

Another take on that is that it may have lulled Rafferty to drop his guard, when otherwise he would have stayed on a war footing.

In the Veteran final there were two incidents that could have decided the title. The first was when Andrew O’Leary’s bowl was blocked when it looked certain to make the truck park. If he had lost, the sporting gods would have been admonished for forsaking him. Perhaps they reflected on that and had a change of heart. For the last shot Mickey Rafferty was throwing to beat O’Leary’s tip. His bowl drifted left and clipped a food carton discarded by some passing motorist. The carton deadened his bowl just enough for it to miss the tip by two feet.

On such small things are the course of someone’s personal sporting history decided. Winning an All-Ireland title is as important for a bowler as it is for a footballer or hurler. Not all sports are created equal, some come with greater accolades and rewards, but winning is the sweetest thing in all of them. There is an exquisite intangibility about victory.

When you hear someone like Novak Djokovic say that winning his Olympic gold medal ‘supersedes everything I imagined’, it puts in context that it is not just about money, even for wealthy superstars. There is the sense that you have done something special in your arena, whether that is in Eglish or in Paris. A plastic carton and the astonishing coincidence of a bowl hitting it in a precise spot were vital in delivering very different judgements to O’Leary and Rafferty, as indeed were all the tiny acts that led to those set of circumstances.

Game management has been cited ad infinitum during the GAA intercounty season, by way of explaining why one team won and the other lost. It is not a phrase often used in bowling, but maybe it should be. A bowler is a bit like a boxer, they are alone in the middle of the ring with the crowd right on top of them. Mike Tyson’s famous quote that ‘everyone has a plan: until they get punched in the face’, has a lot of resonance in bowling.

Things will inevitable go awry. How the bowler can deal with that ultimately decides their fate. You need wise counsel when you get the punch in the face. The problem for bowlers is that very often the advice of those closest to them gets lost in the cacophony coming their way from just about anyone who wants to share their views. It’s not easy to take a deep breath and re-focus when the whole world seems to have lost all reason.

How many times have we heard people holding gold medals or having just scored the penalty to win the game say, ‘I trusted the process’. Bowlers need to firstly recognise the process before then can trust it. The standard advice proffered by the madding crowd is to ‘drive it on, make sure it’s fast anyway’, never ‘take a deep breath and steady the ship’. In last weekend’s championships and the previous series in Castletownkenneigh there were such epic moments when calm counsel to trust the process would have been like a lifebuoy to a momentarily floundering bowler.

Togher Cross club clearly trusts the process. When they helped Hannah Cronin to a convincing intermediate women’s All-Ireland last Saturday it was their fifth win at that grade in two decades. Louise Collins put her name on the All-Ireland cup in 2004, she was followed by Lorraine Hurley in 2009, Catriona Murphy in 2011 and her sister, Aileen Murphy, in 2015.