There was a major shock at the Irish Conker Championships in Freshford, Co Kilkenny yesterday, when a Welsh schoolboy on holidays with his grandparents beat a field of adults to win the national senior title.
Conor Miller (12) added insult to injury by revealing that he'd never even played the game before visiting Freshford. Apparently he just came, he saw and he conkered. The boy wonder - already being spoken of as the Wayne Rooney of chestnuts - will not be eligible for the second part of the winner's prize: a free pint of beer at McSorley's Ale House in Manhattan. But the €1,000 travel voucher to get him to New York is legally his.
Although from Cardiff, he is now entitled to represent Ireland at the world championships next year.
It was a result that highlighted the vagaries of competitive conkering. Among those knocked out early was Freshford man Éamonn Dooley, holder of the world record for conkers demolished in an hour (306), but yet to win the national title.
The brute strength of yesterday's runner-up, Dubliner Tom Weston, had also impressed on the way to the final, but it counted for nothing in the end. "The chestnut wasn't working for me," he lamented afterwards.
This is the nub of the problem. In traditional conkers - as every schoolboy knows - you use your own nut, preferably seasoned from last year's crop and then soaked in vinegar or roasted to toughen it further. The owner of a battle- hardened chestnut notches up his kills like a warplane pilot. But the Irish championships are held under international rules, central to which is that you don't get to use your own equipment.
Like horses, competitors are presented with a bag of nuts before each game. They then pull a string and they take what they get.
This only added to the tension yesterday as 160 entrants, including some from as far away as the US and Australia, vied for the senior title. The village green in Freshford is the theatre of dreams for Irish conker players, fringed as it is by 52 century-old chestnut trees. It's a symphony of colour in late October. But the scenery was lost on the more serious competitors in the centre of the green, where the soundtrack wasn't so much a symphony as the Nutcracker Suite.
Despite the result in the senior competition, it was a good day for Kilkenny. As in hurling, the county has exerted a stranglehold on conkers at under-age level, and claimed titles at under-10 (Shane Donnelly from Freshford), under-13 (Simon Randall from Clontubrid) and under-16 (Owen Brennan from "out the road"). And Conor Miller's grandparents were from Johnstown, so if the senior title escaped the county, it didn't escape the gene-pool.
