Glasgow League - Rumble in the Time Capsule

Buckle up people, this article may get ranty. Archery is a sport where the difference between a high score and a not so high score .. winning and losing .. can be pretty fine. A simple example, shooting indoors, the difference between a 10 and an 8 can be as little as 4 or 6cm depending on the face. That target is just 18m/20yrds away yet it doesn't take a lot of wobble to drop points. In fact, be off as little as 1.4° and you will miss a 90cm indoor boss altogether. In competition, it gets even tighter!

During the 2010 World Archery finals in Edinburgh*, a compounder shot a 7 - it was their only bad arrow in the entire match. The general public in the stands politely clapped. Every archer in the stands gasped. They knew that one arrow had lost the match. It did. During the 2024 Olympic Gents recurve final, the difference between gold and silver after 16 arrows was 4mm. In one of the most thrilling Olympic finals ever ... Kim took gold in Paris because his tie breaking single arrow was the width of an X10 arrow closer the center than Ellison's**. Which brings us to the reason for this article...

On 1st March the fifth round of the Glasgow League was shot at The Time Capsule in Coatbridge. Team GA morphed into Horde GA with 12 archers attending*** .. it was more like a normal Wednesday practice than a competition. The task at hand was simple. Win. Take this round and GA's position should be almost unassailable for the League plaque. Scott, Oksana, Euan and Catherine were the four top scorers this time. Between them they scored 2204 which was, to that moment, the highest total scored in the league and a guaranteed win. Except Strathclyde found 10 more points in someone's quiver. They scored 2214. That's one arrow's worth. F**k!

Exactly how close was this?
With 2400 points possible for 4 archers shooting a portsmouth, 10 points is 0.417% of potential points available to be achieved.
Glasgow averaged 551 per archer - Strathclyde averaged 553.5 ...... a difference of 2.5 points over each archer's 60 arrows.
Glasgow averaged 9.183 per arrow - Strathclyde averaged 9.225 ...... a difference of 0.042 per arrow.
There are words but we're pretty sure the website would be nuked from orbit for that sort of language!

So whats the point to be made here. You cannot, outside of some dodgy mind games (see Geo for details), affect your opponent in archery. You can only shoot your own shot as well as you can and if you shoot well enough, you win. Don't look at what the opposition is doing, their score, what their target face looks like. These are just distractions from you shooting your best. Focus on you being the best archer you can be. Let your opponent worry about you!

In the League, GA went into round five and shot its heart out, delivering what should have been a winning score. Strathclyde found that wafer thin extra effort to secure the win. Neither team affected the other, they each did their own thing and after 240 arrows the difference was the value of one well shot arrow. And that is archery in a nutshell, its just you and your bow doing the best you can.

Stepping back from the weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth and language that a 19th century sailor would complain about. There is one round left to go in the Glasgow League and it is STILL all to play for. Can GA bring that maximum effort one more time to grab victory from the jaws of defeat Rocky style .. or will Strathclyde hold on to give Glasgow a heartbreaking "heroic effort but came up just short" story arc? He..ck, this inaugural season of the Glasgow League has been wild!

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*If you want to see highlights of the 2010 World Cup in Edinburgh ... check out this video. There is possibly one archer in the crowd you might recognize. Front row, red top, red GA hat.
**If, after watching that match, you don't think its the best H2H ever, our editor would like a chat round the back of the container.
***Team GA was Chris, Ashley, Catherine, George, Mark, Scott, Duncan, Jonah, Euan, Oksana, John and Laura. (in surname order: not by degree of fair weather archer, number of arrows owned or time stuck on the clicker)