Welcome appearance from the sidelines

It's been a year the passing of which will be little mourned, a year when sport struggled to assert its importance in the scheme of things. From a springtime of biblical plague to an autumn of epic disaster and war, that period of the year which we devote to distraction and to finding some part of the best of ourselves was annexed by all the things which bring out the worst of us.

It was a year when there was a temptation to consign sport to the margins of human activity, to submit to the bullying of the war buffs and the disaster connoisseurs and dismiss sport as an inconsequentiality in the overall scheme of things.

Why sport is always prey to this creeping unease is a mystery. Perhaps it is because it engages people and makes them care like few other communal experiences left to us. Television, movies, musicals, ballets, operas, comedies, quiz shows all continue unabashed in the face of disaster. In sport though, we contort ourselves and ask if we aren't too trivial to exist in times such as these, if it isn't offensive to applaud a moment of sporting beauty when people are suffering.

In spring and autumn of this bruise-mottled year we stopped playing for one reason or another and, during those times, the world became a starker place.

When the games began again the sense of normality which they brought was as welcome as a sunrise. Part of what makes sport worthwhile is the fact that other than war it is the last great communal experience, the last thing we do together, rubbing shoulders with other citizens and happily yielding up the ever increasing swathes of private space we demand for ourselves and our small privatised lives.

As if to prove sport's value to us, the year finished on a high. Our soccer team went to Tehran and secured a place in next summer's World Cup. We've been there before of course, but 2001 was so unremittingly bleak that qualification, when it arrived, was like a promise of good times. No matter how the cancer of recession spreads next year we have the promise now of a few giddy weeks in summer when we might forget ourselves.

So the spring will be pregnant with anticipation and friendly matches into which we read too much and learn too little. The airwaves will hum with phone-in travel tips and impromptu sporting debates. The year 2002 looks better already.

This past year's gloom was only partially relieved by the qualification process. All those trips and all those games, all the results ground out efficiently never truly liberated us from the fatalistic sense that it would all end in tears.

Even when the team beat Holland at Lansdowne Road on the best day of the sporting year, there was a fear that this could be the peak, a snatched gasp of thin air before the familiar descent of the play-offs.

Not so and we will now follow the fortunes of a team which - apart from those faces residual from previous adventures - has hitherto been faceless and will not metamorphose into a collection of icons. They are younger and a good deal more callow than the teams which Jack Charlton nurtured. It will be a bumpy ride.

Not as bumpy in all likelihood as the ride endured by Warren Gatland. Despite the extraordinary progress of the national team and the astounding success of relatively new European and Celtic level club competitions, Gatland's sudden switch into the ranks of the disappeared suggested that, in this country at least, sports people will still outstrip sports administrators in terms of professionalism. The blazers are always up to something.

Ask the GAA, which got rid of Rule 21 not as a contribution to the peace process in the North but as a belated and somewhat begrudging response to it.

If the eventual abolition of Rule 21 was a private affair for which the association got or deserved little credit, the fiasco over Rule 42 concerning the use of Croke Park by other sports was a full luminous red-cheeked embarrassment. Roscommon's motion to open up Croke Park like a proper commercial concern was undermined first by the announcement on the eve of Congress that £60 million had been slipped into the GAA's breast pocket by a Government anxious to proceed with The Leader's Great Vanity project in distant Abbotstown.

Nevertheless the motion fell just one vote short of getting the two-thirds majority required, as the vote was carried out with many spineless delegates conveniently absenting themselves from the room for its duration.

On the pitch, football's renaissance continued. Galway and the remarkable John O'Mahony were the story of the summer but Meath, Westmeath, Dublin v Kerry, Sligo, Roscommon and many other sub-plots gripped and entertained along the way.

Hurling looks for a way to recover the glory times of the late 1990s. One suspects the greatest game won't have to wait long. Tipperary's young side won a deserved All-Ireland and will be around for a while. They'll have Galway, Limerick, Wexford, Clare and others for company next summer and there will be more games and hopefully better games. And most hopeful of all, Dublin hurling has begun its own reconstruction. Half a decade and the capital may have the team which the game richly deserves.

Speaking of the deserving, the year finished on a high note for Padraig Harrington, whose bulging wallet of runner-up cheques was beginning to cause him real pain. Few people represent this country with such grace and ease as Harrington does, and his determined rise through the world ranks is a source of constant pleasure.

What a golfing year it was. Shorn of the Ryder Cup, it looked like being a sort of groundhog season in April when Tiger Woods annexed the Masters as his fourth major in a row. But just when the rest of the field was about to wave the white flag, the Tiger streak stopped. Retief Goosen and David Duval won the next two majors and it seemed as if golf might once again join the ranks of true competitive sports and cease to be the series of exhibitions it had become.

It was a good year, a great year for Irish rowing, an eerily quiet year for Irish athletics - not even a bullet fired by the Artists Formerly Known as BLE at the Artists Currently Known as OCI.

On the world stage, two comebacks were the best stories. Michael Jordan couldn't let it lie. He ruined the perfect ending to the perfect career to come back with the ineptly named Washington Wizards.

As the season wore on he looked surprisingly chipper for a 38-year-old, which must have both pleased and depressed him. The sheer ordinariness of his wandless confederates was all the more evident with each improvement Jordan made to his game.

Jennifer Capriati was a different story. In a game colonised by the acne and trust account set she made the case for people with real lives, ending the long road back from oblivion, disillusion and drug use with two Grand Slam tournaments, the Australian Open and the French Open.

Lance Armstrong won again and kept some of us wondering. The IOC gave the Olympics to China without asking one question about human rights. And we said goodbye to Samaranch and hello to the infinitely less slippery Jacques Rogge.

Which brings us to the end point of all review pieces, the quick look ahead to the following year. It begins in Salt Lake City with the winter Olympics, a city and an event that have become a living symbol of corruption at the top level of sport.

Hopefully sport will rise above the level of those who run it and 2002 will be as full of grace as 2001 was of woe.