The long game SPORT: Epic clashes, hopes triumphantly fulfilled, drama, tragedy and joy all find their way on to the sports pages KEITH DUGGAN

We live in a world where sport is everywhere and all the time. The next big event is always just around the corner and is trumpeted even more loudly than the last. The match or fight or race has its day in the sun (or, in Ireland, in misty rain) or night under lights, the crowd bays and chants and sings and then it is over; the athletes, flushed and spent, exit the arena, the stadium empties, the big notions and hot talk evaporates and the place is still except for the cleaners moving stoically through the seats picking up wrappers, discarded programmes and the occasional pair of spectacles smashed at the high point of the unbearable excitement.

Sports of all kind are an enduring testament to man's facility for becoming unreasonably excited at the slightest provocation. It is all in the moment. What happens to sports events after the whistle goes or the bell sounds? For sure, the details live on in memory and imagination and the classic feats are always visible, inflated by folklore and nostalgia and always up above us in the sky, there to be pointed out to the new generation. But so much gets forgotten. It is sobering and even a little frightening to think that a century and a half of finished, never-to-be-played-again games and races and challenges are locked in the archives of newspapers around the world.

The old rap about today's newspaper as tomorrow's wrapping for a good haddock supper has a ring of truth to it. Newspapers are necessarily of the day. But it overlooks the fact that the original copy is always there, preserved for posterity and, as they say, for the record – however biased that record might be. There is a peculiar thrill in lighting up ancient newspaper records on microfilm or the magic of digital replication: it is akin to shining a torch into a long-locked room of an old house. The moths and dust all but rise in the air. Old newspapers hold the secrets to prevailing moods and prejudices and to the restraint and forbearance of earlier generations, where world wars were announced with less hysteria than, say, the attention devoted to David Beckham's wonky metatarsal bone in this century.

The disconcerting thing about old sports reports, however, is that by reading them, you resurrect the team, the athlete and the moment all over again. There is Ronnie Delaney lining up in Melbourne, here is Arkle closing in on Mill House in Cheltenham, 1964; there is Christy Ring in September of 1956, chaired in defeat around Croke Park by O'Donnell and Rackard of Wexford, a moment that passed into elegy even as it happened.

How do you start to put order on 150 years of sports as recorded in The Irish Times? It didn't take long for the pastimes of the day to make their way onto the pages - by April 2nd 1859, the Sporting Intelligence column was informing readers of the sad demise of the Marquis of Waterford with a breathless and macabre account of a hunting accident ("… brandy was placed into his mouth and externally applied, but animation returned not. He was dead") and coursing and cricket notices featured regularly in the earliest editions.

Browsing through the pages, there is the sense of the major sports gradually coming out of the bud, with new clubs in constant formation and first-ever matches taking place. The scores of the games and the scorers amount to obscure statistics but it is the other details that bring those occasions alive. Consider this information from an inter-provincial rugby match between Ulster and Leinster played in 1884: "The Leinster fifteen arrived at the Ormeau Road soon after three o'clock and were photographed in front of the pavilion by the team of Seggons, of Belfast. The Ulster fifteen, in order to save time, postponed the operation and at once appeared on the field."

Or this terse, read-it-and-wince description of an 1886 hurling match between North Tipperary and Athenry: "This was a severe contest and ended in a draw. The Galway team played in bare feet."

The newspaper generally comprised four pages then and the sports notices appear to have been placed in haphazard fashion, hence the report of a race at Ascot alongside headlines such as, "Zululand Fieldforce Complete." But the tradition of concentrating sports on the inside pages of the newspaper was firmly established and continued right up until the 1980s, when at last the decision was made to relocate the sport to the more conventional home in the smoky den of the back pages was taken -- until they too began to burgeon so much that separate sports sections became inevitable.

But those early days suggested an element of uncertainty as to how much coverage sport even deserved in a newspaper. The 1906 Olympics from Athens was covered with daily telegrams of a few paragraphs, including one that delighted in regaling readers with George V's amusing reply to O'Connor's request to hoist the Irish flag: "When Ireland has a Parliament of its own, you can hoist the flag but not before then. Perhaps there will be an Irish Parliament by the time of the next Olympian games."

Random reports illustrate the way sport and politics were always mixed up. In December 1914, an account of the All-Ireland football final between Wexford and Kerry was the subject of Some Reflections of a Football Match. "The match was witnessed," noted our man in Croke Park, "by upwards of 15,000 strong, healthy young men of military age." It is not hard to guess the direction in which his mind was wandering: "I could not help wondering what it was which kept these young men from joining their brothers in maintaining and enhancing the honour of Ireland in the trenches of France and north Belgium. Were their enthusiasm and patriotism sufficiently aroused, there is nothing would delight them more than a ‘scrap' with the enemy. They would throw themselves wholeheartedly into such a fight…"

In the years afterwards, Gaelic games began to feature regularly in the sports pages. Curiously, there have only been three who have held the title of Gaelic Games correspondent in the history of the newspaper, spanning the early part of the last century through to the latest edition. Gaelic games came to feature regularly in the sports pages, with a strong emphasis on rugby and racing as well as regular notes on yachting, tennis, bowling and other urban and urbane pursuits of the day.

Many of the reports were, for economic and logistical reasons, local. International events tended to be covered by that most prolific of newspapermen, A Special Correspondent. Mass travel was still in the future. But the outside world was not ignored. It came as a surprise, for instance, to learn how thoroughly the career of Muhammad Ali was covered in the newspaper. For over a decade, Louisville's finest featured regularly on the sports pages, from his early stunning world heavyweight victory over Sonny Liston to his famous encounter in Croke Park in July 1972. It was a night on which the most of the action happened ringside, according to the page one report.

"When the second row was hastily cleared to make way for the Taoiseach [Mr Jack Lynch], Mr Neil Blaney TD sat steadfastly on, puffing his pipe. A horrified official realised that the political opponents would be sitting cheek by jowl. His exhortations to an American big wheel went unheeded, as the latter was having his own difficulties trying to find seats for Muhammad Ali's mother. The Special Branch rescued the situation by smoothly placing themselves between the Irish champion and the Donegal challenger. Bishop Casey of Kerry later sat beside the Taoiseach and took the bare look off him."

There were, of course, many photographs of Ali's famous visit to Dublin. Although early editions of the newspaper are dauntingly print-heavy, photographs began to appear on the sports pages in the 1930s, with, for instance, headshots of Pat O'Callaghan and Bob Tisdall along with despatches on their heroics at the Los Angeles Olympics.

It was a far cry from the current vogue for sophisticated half-page full colour splashes and on-line video replays but even then, it was plain to see that sport was, from the beginning, happy to elbow its way towards gaining more space and prominence. It was a slow process. For instance, Ireland's bid for the Grand Slam became one of the key events of this year's sporting calendar. The last success, in 1948, was reported on page two of The Irish Times as "a red-letter day for Irish rugby". There was a single photograph and a match report and that was that.

But then, the entire newspaper was only eight-pages that day. In the age of mass digital technology, the long tradition of sports reportage has come to look quaint to the point of endangerment. But many pencils have been sharpened and countless notebooks filled for reports that found their way, through telegram and telephone and finally by email to the sports pages of The Irish Times. It has been a long game and the rules change constantly. All going well, it has a while to run yet.