It was rugby's year, and every other sporting organisation needs to acknowledge it because they're playing catch-up, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

WITH THE country going to hell on a hand wagon and Ryan Tubridy encouraging his listeners to get out and fondle the pages of

Strumpet City

who would have guessed that the sport of the year would be rugby and that the proletariat, or large segments thereof, could be so uplifted by the ancient art of eggchasing.

Ah Jaysus, as Rashers Tierney might have said.

There is no denying it though. The same people who watched Ricardo Cordoba being pummelled by Bernard Dunne in The Point in March had earlier that day been merrily inhaling the sweetly wafting fumes of Ireland’s Grand Slam success. And when Croker filled in May for the Heineken Cup semi-final our little jokes about Munstershire playing Leinstershire rang hollow against the realisation that most of the attendance had been on Jones’s Road before, seeking out other sports.

So when the awards and the gongs were being handed out at the end of the year in various hotels around Dublin most of them ended up in the horny hands of rugby players and if there could be an overall award for excellence it would go to the sport itself.

For the year and for the decade just past.

On the pitch, Irish rugby has transformed itself from being a game which drew patronising grins from victorious foreign opponents who admired the heroic beeriness of the breath emanating from the Irish side of the scrum and the passion of a crew prepared to do anything to win, except to prepare to win.

The game has gone from being a preserved area for alickadoos to being the proving ground for Roy Keane’s premise that Irish teams who prepare with professionalism and pure dedication have no business being chuffed about being also-rans.

There was a time when rugby people turned up at GAA training sessions wondering what could be learned and gleaned and borrowed. Now it is the other way around. County teams crave the attention of men who have had contact with Munster or Leinster or Ireland.

Rightly so. Matched only perhaps by the high performance unit of Irish Amateur Boxing, the people who run and play rugby have become market leaders in the business of attention to detail in terms of preparation.

In doing so, they have changed an entire culture within their sport.

The spring and the Grand Slam which it brought with it may have been an indicator of success, but autumn’s battles against South Africa and Australia mean more for a team of serious ambition. No Irish team in any sport has ever gone into battle feeling so serious about itself and its preparations.

If the embrace of professionalism has been surprisingly well received by Irish rugby, it must be said to that what Irish rugby gives back it does with an evangelical zeal and there is a lot which rival sports could learn about rugby’s approach to media.

The surprising amount of space which the game has come to occupy in the national imagination is reflected in the huge acreage of media coverage which the rugby has commandeered by means of being genial, co-operative, organised and recognisable.

There is a sense hitherto only seen in American sports that coverage and exposure and recognisability are good things.

No matter how Corinthian the heart which beats beneath your blazer the sport you are in is a business. If money is the oxygen of every sport, it is organisation, coverage and selling which bring the money in. Rugby does that very well.

As the GAA prepares to make marquee stars like Seán Óg and John Mullane unrecognisable by sticking helmets on them and soccer players grow so sullen that one wonders is the recession happening to them and them alone, rugby is the shining example of how to market a sport.

You open a newspaper or fiddle with the remote during the rugby season and there will be a player talking articulately and confidently about his game, giving some impression as to his character and personality. Something for the kids to soak up.

It matters. In the Irish context the FAI have more to be worrying about with League of Ireland clubs disappearing under the waterline every second day and the hand of Henry having smited us so cruelly, but the GAA needs desperately to learn a lesson or two about selling its product in a competitive domestic market.

It was a decent year for GAA, but worrying trends persist as the association weans itself off the income which rugby and soccer crowds have brought into Croke Park in recent years. Kilkenny’s four in a row was a remarkable achievement, won with some style and bravery, and Tipperary, the opposition, made sure the coronation only took place after one of the memorable and most frank of finals in recent decades.

Kilkenny are a case in point, however, when it comes to the GAA selling itself. The stripey men are fielding perhaps the greatest team ever to play the greatest game.

Michael Kavanagh, for instance, has seven All-Ireland senior medals won in 11 years at the top of his game. Rob Kearney won his first cap for Ireland in the summer of 2007.

Most school kids would recognise Kearney ahead of Kavanagh. That’s not Mick Kavanagh’s fault. Or Rob Kearney’s fault.

Kilkenny’s once-a-year media nights are a running joke to the press forced to attend them and have become basically a speed-dating event involving obscure panel members and journalists who don’t really care.

Is it anybody’s fault?

Kilkenny will argue that servicing the media isn’t their problem. And that may be true. And Croke Park will grin and say they may be cats, but they’re as cute as foxes, hee hee, but the old philosophy of whatever you say, say nothing, is failing the GAA badly right now and the price will be paid down the line.

It’s the GAA’s fault for having no coherent strategy for marketing its games or its players, for suffering from what the Aussies call tall poppy syndrome. Anybody blossoming with their head above the crowd gets that head lopped off. For all the whining and bellyaching which goes on about the threat to our national games from losing a handful of young fellas to Aussie Rules every autumn, there seems to be an unwillingness to address the fact that, on the ground, rugby is sucking young players in with a gravitational force.

Kearney, of course, was lost to Cooley Kickhams.

Hurling needs a return to the revolution years of the mid-90s. The big three reasserted themselves cruelly in the noughties and it isn’t a good thing. Dublin’s chances of being the first side to break through the glass ceiling have been dealt a severe blow with the defection of Ross O’Carroll to football, but football needs a successful Dublin side and in O’Carroll a ready made full back has been found. Swings and roundabouts as ever.

If Kilkenny completed their four-in-a-row with a stunning game Kerry’s sixth All-Ireland final appearance in succession brought an equally impressive demonstration of power and confidence. Cork’s goal, instead of being the bugle call for the Rebels to unleash all their powers, merely saw Kerry move quickly to tighten the screws and force the issue.

Elsewhere, if it wasn’t for bad news we would have had no GAA news at all. The bitterness of the Cork strike gave way in the autumn to the messiness of similar situations in Clare and Limerick, stand-offs which the GAA seems to have no Plan B.

When it comes to Plan B, of course, the FAI launched themselves into award winning territory themselves. Of course, it was embarrassing that president of Fifa Sepp Blatter revealed the association’s 33rd team idea, but the idea itself was so exquisitely mortifying it should never have been raised in the first place.

Even a monk who had successfully negotiated a lifetime of service to a vow of silence would have found it hard to keep schtum about a big juicy one like that.

Still, the pillage of Paris and our unrestrainedly undignified reaction to it all served to remind us that soccer exists as a separate universe with different laws and traditions. If the GAA has to monitor itself constantly, world soccer just has to bumble along.

Blatter, nobody’s idea of a smooth operator, is the ideal figure to lead the game because the game is effectively bulletproof.

As a species we are addicted to it and will forgive it anything.

Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger can go through a year of press conferences without saying anything sensible or anything from their own players which is consistent with what they demand from the world around them, but it all heightens their standing as mystics.

Mark Hughes can win a cracker of a game by four goals to three and lose his job within two hours. Rafa Benitez has the gift of eternal life and Leeds United can languish unfairly in League One.

The big carnival rolls on.

Given Fifa’s failure to invite any country who suffered bad luck or bad decision-making in the qualifiers next summer’s World Cup opens without us at it. That’s hard, but all the better for us, judging it dispassionately.

For practically every World Cup in living memory, Spain have arrived with the words Dark Horses stamped on their passport. They’ve gone home a short while later deemed to have the brains of rocking horses. Next year though?

Argentina have a tantalising amount of forward talent available to them, but the appointment of Diego Maradona as manager means the little man whose handball cheating we so enjoyed back in 1986 (get over it Enger-land!) will probably diminish his pockmarked reputation some more.

Still, he wins the award for the most astonishing press conference of 2009 and tickets for his shows in South Africa will be the hottest item since Winnie Mandela’s “necklaces”.

Still that’s next year.

We do the “looking forward” routine next week. 2009 has to be cleared away first. No review, of course, would be complete without further mention of Bernard Dunne whose win over Cordoba undoubtedly provided one of the great nights in Irish sport.

Six months later, Dunne’s traumatic defeat to Poonsawat Kratingdaenggym bookended his brief but golden reign as world champion and reminded us yet again that there is no sport more cruel or more lonely than boxing.

Bernard Dunne’s comportment in the wake of both victory and defeat were reminders to us, though, of the dignity and perspective that sport demands.

Dignity might be Pádraig Harrington’s middle name, but the year just passed didn’t see that name get engraved on any more significant trophies and Rory McIlroy’s ascent tended to cruelly outline the trajectory of Pádraig’s decline.

Still, Harrington has always been meticulous and frank when it comes to deconstructing his golf game and starting over. With Tiger Woods laying down his bag for a while, and with his aura permanently dented, it will be interesting to see who, if anybody, steps up to become the dominant figure in the game.

Meanwhile, the flaccid attendance figures during Tiger’s absence through injury last year and the fears for the pro game while he takes his indefinite break must make us wonder what sport these days is all about.

Whatever happened to everybody loving an underdog?

Where is the pleasure in just watching Tiger’s processions Sunday after Sunday or experiencing Manchester United doing precisely what the investment of money into their company entitles them to do.

Give us the little guy.

Give us the big dream.

Give us back the romance and dignity and the perspective.

If those things mean anything then for all his fragility and all his courage and his perseverance Bernard Dunne must be the Irish sports person of the year.