January Echo Sports Star of the Month announced
By Stephen Leonard
January 2016 Echo Sports Star of the Month - AMANDA LARKIN
IT’S been a tremendous start to the new year for Ireland’s top female tenpin bowler Amanda Larkin.
The Tallaght woman turned in another great performance to successfully defend her Women’s Irish Open prize in January before then making it back-to-back National Adult Championship titles.
As the only female competitor to qualify for the final 32, Larkin automatically took the Women’s Irish Open title, but it did not stop there for her as she made it all the way to the quarter-finals in the overall competition, eventually losing out to Ron Hurt who had beaten her last year too.
Earlier this month, Larkin was forced to dig deep to come through, what was one of the tightest ever finishes to the National Championships in ALSAA, producing a strike on her final effort to eventually see off the fierce challenge of Lucan’s Aoife Hall.
Indeed she found herself 120 pins adrift of Hall after making the cut for the final top four, from where they continued on to play a further nine games.
By the fifth, she had managed to whittle away the deficit and it came down to the final ball when Larkin needed a strike to clinch the prize and she served up just that.
