  In this work, we study the annihilation of a pair of `t Hooft-Polyakov
monopoles due to confinement by a string. We analyze the regime in which the
scales of monopoles and strings are comparable. We compute the spectrum of the
emitted gravitational waves and find it to agree with the previously calculated
point-like case for wavelengths longer than the system width and before the
collision. However, we observe that in a head-on collision, monopoles are never
re-created. Correspondingly, not even once the string oscillates. Instead, the
system decays into waves of Higgs and gauge fields. We explain this phenomenon
by the loss of coherence in the annihilation process. Due to this, the entropy
suppression makes the recreation of a monopole pair highly improbable. We argue
that in a similar regime, analogous behaviour is expected for the heavy quarks
connected by a QCD string. There too, instead of re-stretching a long string
after the first collapse, the system hadronizes and decays in a high
multiplicity of mesons and glueballs. We discuss the implications of our
results.
