BEIJING 2008:THE BEST-LAID plans, etc. The preliminary fight tactic for yesterday as laid out by Kenny Egan in the mixed zone of the Workers' Gymnasium the other evening was extempore but perfect.

Hearing that Zhang Xiaoping had defeated the highly favoured Kazakh fighter Yerkebulan Shynaliyev in the other semi-final, Egan professed to know little about the Chinese fighter other than that he was big and orthodox.

"A big man makes an easier target. Sure we'll give him a few slaps and see how he goes on after that."

These things are always complicated by the presence of an opponent. Somewhere else in Beijing, having, presumably, studied the way Egan built his entire Olympic campaign on the stunning alacrity of his defence, Zhang Xiaoping came up with the same plan a while later. Give Egan a few slaps and see how he goes on after that.

That as much as the judging, which was undoubtedly but probably unavoidably influenced by the partisan crowd in yesterday's final, consigned Kenny Egan to his fate yesterday.

The best summation of the situation was provided by Egan himself; surveying his defeat he gave us a quote to place alongside John O'Sullivan's comment in Atlanta to the effect that nobody had died.

"Ah," said Kenny shaking his head, "the whole arse has fallen out of it now, to be honest. I know an Olympic silver medal is brilliant and all but I thought I had the beatings of the guy. Olympic silver medallists are very rare. I am proud to be Irish, proud to have a silver medal, but it's always nice to get the gold. The score is the score. I have to settle for silver. I'm disgusted but that's sport. There has to be a loser."

Zhang's victory was built on early success. He scored twice on Egan in the first round and the roars which greeted each of those landed punches put a lightness in the step of the big man who delivered them. When the first-round bell sent the fighters back to their corners, Egan, knowing he had started more slowly than he intended, was determined not to let the seconds seep away and had to fashion a Plan B.

Easy. Just go for it.

So Kenny came out swinging. Suddenly the most beautifully economical of fighters was chasing his man around the ring. In the impressive fury which followed there is no doubt blows Egan scored failed to count or seemed to register for Zhang and Zhang got the benefit of the extreme doubt a couple of times.

It was sad and unsatisfactory from an Irish point of view but the beauty of Egan's original scheme was that it would have tranquillised the crowd in the Workers' Gymnasium. With the local hero ahead and the blows being exchanged freely Zhang was always going to benefit from the deficiencies in the scoring system.

Egan was 2-0 down at the end of the first but tied the second round three all. Twice, however, in the third when he closed the margin to one he was the victim of poor decisions which restored the two-point margin to Zhang and left him 7-5 ahead going into the last round.

Billy Walsh sent his man out with the only instructions left to give.

"I told him he to go out and throw as many punches as he could. He had to keep working. He had to hunt him down and try to score, which isn't Kenny's game but he had to chase him and dig out every score."

Walsh instructed Egan to work on three- or four-punch combinations "because he had been hitting him with good right hooks and good left hands to the body and he wasn't getting scores for them".

The fourth round was two minutes of furious desperation. With the crowd at fever pitch - the Irish contingent booing the pattern of errant scoring, the Chinese roaring their man on - Egan's brave efforts looked doomed all through.

It ended with Zhang doubling his margin and winning by 11-7. To suggest that Egan, who had conceded just seven scoring punches in his previous four bouts here, had suddenly gone all loosey-goosey and conceded eleven to a big, orthodox lad would be an insult to the Neilstown man, but the evidence through two weeks in the Workers' Gymnasium was not so much that the judging was corrupt but that those pressing the buttons were a little excitable.

Officials conceded - after Paddy Barnes registered zero in a competitive bout with China's Zou Shiming in his Friday semi-final - that some judges had the Irishman down for a score of seven, which was more in line with the fighter's own view of things. But boxing's requirement for three of five judges to register any shot means that in a situation of high excitement, with roars greeting every perceived shot, the home fighter is going to get most of the marginal decisions when just a couple of judges need to be trigger happy.

For the Irish boxers who came to Beijing there is the consolation that each man lost to the eventual gold medallist in his classification and that the IABA's high-performance programme looks like a model of well used resources. A model well worth copying elsewhere. Five fighters, three of them young enough to have used the experience as a launching pad for London 2012, three of them medallists.

"For the team it has been a fantastic performance throughout," said Billy Walsh. "Everybody performed. They gave their all for the country. At home with all the doom and gloom, the weather and the recession, well, hopefully we put a smile on peoples faces."

If that was the intention they succeeded handsomely, none more so than Egan, whose geniality and manners shone through even this disappointment.

He earned the last words and, finding the right ones, looked to the future. "I'm proud of the way I performed. Who knows, in four years team I could still be captain. I love the amateur game. That's what it's all about."

What is it they say? What does not kill you makes you stronger. London ho!