To the best of my recollection, there were only two occasions on which yours truly left Croke Park in tears. In the aftermath of the 1995 Leinster SFC Final. And likewise at the end of the Sam Maguire Cup showdown against Galway half a dozen years later.
The common thread between the two occasions being that, on each, at the start of the second half, Meath seemed ideally placed to drive on and secure the silverware. Only for those ambitions to implode quicker than Liz Truss’s stint as British Prime Minister.
To this day, in both cases, it’s actually hard to decipher how the arse could fall out of the ship in such catastrophic fashion. I’ve always had my own theory on what went wrong against Galway, but it still wouldn’t go within an ass’s roar of explaining how the 18 players who saw action that day malfunctioned so terribly.
Mind you, in sports that are individual pursuits, there are no such safety nets as turning to team mates. Only the person playing the golf decides what club to hit a shot with. Only the jockey a top the steed can decide what way to ride a race.
You get the picture. In more recent times, the greatest illustration there could be that there’s no I in team came on the biggest stage in darts when Gian Van Veen had the sort of big occasion debut most of us would shudder at the mere thought of.
But here’s the thing, it wasn’t actually that the newly ascended Dutch number one did anything wrong. In fact, the 24-year-old can be said to have performed exceptionally well. The problem from his perspective was that his opponent, six years his junior, yet again produced darts not seen on this planet previously!
To have stood any chance, the big Dutch man needed to get away to a flying start, which he actually did. Wrapping up the first set in jig time. Naturally, all that did was succeed in poking the bear in Littler after he literally made the world No. 3 look like an ordinary pub player.
That, he most certainly is not, thus with the gargantuan Sid Waddell Trophy long hauled home for another year, Littler has no signs or intention of easing up. That’s fantastic news for those of us lucky to be connoisseurs of tungsten throwing, as with Van Veen only likely to get better and better, Saturday night’s final was probably the first chapter in the next great rivalry in the sport unfolding right before us.
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