Dreaming the impossible dream

LockerRoom: A return to ethical sport and a big gesture from the GAA top the New Year wish list of Tom Humphries. He isn't holding his breath

In this gig there is a happy consensus about how to proceed with the obituary of a sporting year. Any year which is freshly deceased is deemed to have been "sparkling". The athletes and players who were headline fodder in that year are noted as having "reached new heights" and "set new standards". Quite often we who get delighted and excited for a living find that we were "inspired" in some unspecified way. The year under review is always the year when we "rediscovered the joy of sport".

The only thing which could possibly be better than the year just gone past is the fabulous year which lurks just around the corner. The sparkle of next year will always be more lustrous, dangerous indeed to view with the naked eye. (And we'll be previewing that lustre in the same breathless tones next week.)

Meanwhile, on with the clichés and straight to the clinking of Waterford Crystal glasses as a sated nation toasts the "wonderful memories" of 2004.

Certainly, here on the septic isle, like excited corgis on a trampoline we scaled new heights. We put some indelible moments into the national scrap book. And truly our cup of positive A samples hath runneth over. Sure, we got disillusioned too, but the disillusion might just be the path to enlightenment. Or the other way around.

So, drink up! Get that refreshing isotonic vodka down you, there's a lot to rummage through and not all of it smells like daisies.

Was there ever a better and more moving yarn than that of Cian O'Connor and his poor psychotic horse. Even at Christmas time, which period represents a good tale in itself, The Horse, The Sample, The Thief and His Motives are worthy candidates for being the greatest story ever told.

Cian, of course, was brought to us courtesy of the Olympics, a mostly discredited quadrennial production wherein even the leavening moments of athletic brilliance leave one fretting lest an investigation reveals needles and lab coats to have been present at the conception.

In that context Cian O'Connor's medal was a funny one from the outset. The winning of it was entirely without preamble or drumroll, and, showjumping being so remote from the day-to-day experience of the plain people of Ireland, it all unfolded not as an occasion for frothy national exuberance. Instead, news that O'Connor had stormed the flimsy plywood pantheon of Irish Olympic heroes was greeted mainly with a shrug and a smile and often with "Who?" We were happy, even in the knowledge that RTÉ would be making a 12-course meal of it. The thought of disaster never struck us. Unlike Michelle de Bruin, he didn't smell fishy.

That, though, was the nature of the Irish Olympic experience. Sallying forth to catastrophe with a song in our hearts. Walking gaily into the propellers of catastrophe. It all turned so dismal that even a gold medal conferred on the horsey set late in the day wasn't going to make the skies go all blue again. Still, we'd best get used to that empty-handed feeling.

In Athens we set new standards in ordinariness and got a glimpse of the barren tundra that we will be yomping across in the imminent post-Sonia era. We'd better start believing it's the taking part that counts.

We must start to appreciate now that we have been lucky rather than proficient in the business of producing Olympic athletes. Eamonn Coghlan, John Treacy and Sonia O'Sullivan were aberrations, golden freaks who succeeded despite our neglect. They were talents who went to America for their finishing school, athletes whose unlikely genius kept us from looking over their shoulders to the wasteland behind.

When you consider that Sonia's poignant goodbye wave from the broom wagon was the key moment of uplift in our Olympic experience you begin to see the sort of trouble that we are in.

Does it matter? Not a lot, if the truth be told. Our concentration on elite athletes and our craving for occasions of triple olé jollity have served us poorly. There was a small militant tendency after the Olympics which drolly blamed the GAA for the lack of our conspicuous athletic success. That was wrong-headed and missed the point so wilfully that it would be best if proponents of the notion were burned as witches.

If the GAA keeps thousands of young people playing sports week in and week out (as does soccer and rugby), it is doing its job. All the rest is trimming, and the nation's health and well being is better served by mass participation than it would be by the external validation which some consider to be the mark of sporting well being.

(At this point it seems only fair to point out that this particular review of the year will not include the announcement of a series of fake awards. The Bill Clinton Inappropriate Use of a Good Cigar Award goes to Cian O'Connor for his Work with Prescription Drugs for Humans. None of that.)

The challenge is not gold medals at the Olympics; the challenge is not getting B standard qualifiers there. The challenge is participation and the mainstream sports have mastered that.

The challenge also is a return to ethical sport. That'll be as tough as a return to ethical planning decisions, but dreaming is still free.

If the GAA and (maybe a bit close to the bone this one) the FAI were to shut up shop in the morning, athletics wouldn't know what to do. The kids would just sit about growing fat and running up world class PlayStation scores.

WE KNOW THIS, HOW? For decades the world of track and field has been an avenue for women to explore. Some of the greatest Olympians have had the female chromosome (then there were the east Germans, who were pretty borderline, but we digress).

For most of that time the GAA and the FAI entirely ignored the female half of the Irish sporting constituency, apart from conscripting them to the making of sandwiches and tea. Did Irish athletics produce a string of top women performers when they had untrammelled access to all that potential? Nope.

Sonia was as inspiring as an athlete can be. Where is the generation of new Sonias to follow on? The work hasn't been done, but if that generation of young women are playing camogie or Gaelic football or soccer or whatever, they are as well off.

If you were asked tomorrow to send your daughter off to the world of elite athletics knowing all that you know about what it takes to succeed there, would you? The siren song of the gold medals is so enticing though. It promises money and a jam of open-top buses. Not money to your local community, but money into the embedded media organisations who will cover the annexing of the gold medal and lead the cheering. Without the chauvinism, without those moments when this great little sporting nation huddles around the TV, without the morning-after hangovers when everybody buys the newspaper and vows to keep it forever - without those things the cost of sports rights is just prohibitive and Bill O'Herlihy begins to look older as he asks the boys to explain away another failure.

So that's the lesson. Some of our greatest sporting events are just castles built in the air. If they were to reform and become genuine and pure sporting occasions again they would collapse because the money wouldn't be interested. And if the money ain't interested . . .

That warped world view has a side-effect. The insistence that gold medals are the index of our success as a sporting nation produces the scandals which have nagged at us in the past few years.

Nagged. Nothing more. We're skipping on to other stuff. The delayed but growing commitment to grassroots community sport, to the appreciation of the well being which sport brings and the ethical obligations which come with it, have stifled all our post-Michelle, post-Lombard, post-Athens discussion on what we as a people want from sport.

When we get to Beijing it will be 52 years since we have won a track gold medal, and in that time we will have won only one gold (Michael Carruth's) whichdidn't come with a luminous question mark hanging over it. Some success would be nice: characters like Sam Lynch, Gearóid Towey and Adrian O'Dwyer, for instance, deserve a day in the sun after the brutal experience of Athens. But if our run stretches to 56 years, so be it. There are other priorities.

Apart from the private matter of our own small failures, the Olympics themselves were a disappointment.

Firstly, Athens was ready. Some day a host city genuinely won't be finished building and painting and TV cameras will pick out brickies and chippies toiling away in the background as the opening ceremony begins. Athens bluffed all the way to the line but pulled a fine logistical operation out of the bag. The pity was that in the end the Games which the Greeks got didn't match the infrastructure they so graciously offered. For having a tax burden for generations to come, were the Games worth it? The unfolding BALCO scandal was enough to diminish the bling bling of the track, but the series of, ahem, unfortunate events which befell Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou as they hurried to be drug-tested hit the host nation in the gut.

After that, much of what we saw was anticlimactic. Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe and Gary Hall Jnr in the pool were worth watching even if they struggled to distract BBC viewers from the the persistent intrusion of Sharron Davies' poolside pointers.

It has been quite a year for the female bosom. Nothing which the dysfunctional Olympic family could do, indeed nothing Osama could do was quite as distracting or upsetting to the United States of America as the unceremonious unveiling of Janet Jackson's bosom of mass destruction at the Super Bowl in February. As an event, it not only sent an entire God-fearing nation into a righteous swoon, but it heralded the beginning of a generally disastrous year for US sport.

The BALCO business has given cloven feet and tails to the erstwhile golden figures of American track, and has even gotten its fingers into the blessed heart of baseball. The newest version of the basketballing Dream Team had a nightmare in Athens, while the highlight of the current NBA season has been an entertaining five-minute fist-fight between players and fans at a Detroit Pistons/Indiana Pacers game.

Only close relatives and a parole officer know who the heavyweight boxing champion of the world is right now, while

Vijay Singh has completed his painstaking work on the eclipse of Tiger Woods. Lance Armstrong continues to be a matter of what you believe and why. All the major men's and women's tennis championships went elsewhere. Then there was the Ryder Cup.

Just goes to show what can be wrought by one moment of wanton decadence at the Super Bowl.

NOW THEN. Be upstanding please and raise your glasses in a toast to one of the best stories of the year. The Greek national football team. We have no evidence that Greek TV hosts a Sports Personality of the Year Show with their own Sue Barkerouski and Gary Linekeris, or even a Marty Morriskaokias, but if they do the Greek soccer team can hardly have expected in this, the year of the Athens Olympics, to have been the shoo-ins for the big gong.

Ah, the European Championships were a tonic for cynical hearts. Lovely country and fine stadia. Many good games and one great, great game between the Dutch and the Czech Republic on a lovely evening in the little paintbox stadium in Aveiro.

For the Portuguese, a warm but pessimistic people, there must be mixed feelings about the entire thing. Beaten on the first and last nights by Greece, plenty of what came in between confounded and delighted them. The golden generation of players were shocked into something resembling sprightliness by an infusion of cocky youngsters. They played some epic games. In their hearts the natives never truly expected to win big, but beating Spain was the height of the good times along the way.

There was so much to enjoy. The hype surrounding Wayne Rooney was overwhelming if partly justified, but the riposte has to be: get back to us in 10 years. Then we'll judge. Right now the weight heaped on his shoulders is worrying.

Around Rooney, England fiddled and dozed but did just enough to keep alive the notion that because Sven Goran Eriksson is bespectacled and foreign he must be some kind of god of footballing braininess. This despite bimbo eruptions, limp tournament exits and the kowtowing to populism which the Beckham captaincy is. Nice work if you can get it, Sven.

(Interested readers who have contacted us during the year to express their views on previously published and much expanded diatribes on the subjects of Rooney, Beckham, Sven and English Soccer Hooliganism will be pleased to note that the collected rants are now available in one beautifully designed tome. The perfect Christmas gift. Credit card details to me at the usual address: youbleedin'gaabigot.org.)

At Euro 2004, a French team whom we have loved placed one foot into the footballing grave. The Spanish did what they always do and went home early with a headache. Italy paid the price for prior indiscipline: well, what about those Latin temperaments then, Big Ron? For the Czechs, Pavel Nedved got the tournament his career so richly deserved to be crowned by. The Dutch only managed on occasion to look like the Dutch. Germany were just awful. So awful that probably only the Germans have an adequate word for it.

The Greeks, by winning a more than decent tournament didn't just refute those dour folk who insist that great tournaments can be won only by great soccer nations, they gave hope to the romantics who believe that with passion and organisation and belief the little guy can still walk tall through the canyons of money that the modern game represents.

No such hope closer to home. Arsenal prevailed in the Premiership, but their long unbeaten run was oddly underhyped in the British media, perhaps because it was more of a French achievement than it was an English triumph.

There is a deathless certainty to Premiership life these days. Chelsea are lovely to watch, but one would hope that a team assembled at such vast expense wouldn't bore the pants off you. The other big money firms of Manchester United and Arsenal will maul and scratch, and Liverpool will aspire to join that elite echelon of PLCs. Until the league introduces salary caps and equitable profit sharing it will always be that way. For now, we have only David Moyes' resilient, Rooneyless Everton to sustain the torch of belief which the Greeks lit in us.

AT HOME, the domestic title came back to Shelbourne, who if only for their big adventure in Europe deserved as much.

The football was efficient but unlovely and the eternal merry-go-round of too many players in an all too small circuit is off-putting, especially for Bohs fans.

As for the business of clubs with no permanent address: can't something be done for those people? There's little point at this festive time of year in upsetting everyone's stomachs by picking through the festering entrails of the FAI. Suffice to say that if the association can achieve in organisation and morale and results those standards which the national team have set, well they will be in the clear.

John Delaney (the best quiff in the game, in my view) is charm-bombing the world just now, and he is a brisk and efficient operator who knows his stuff. There is a suspicion though that, for the good of football, everyone involved in the current dispensation will have to fall upon their sword. It will take a long time for old resentments to disappear and all the image changes and makeovers only cover a metastasising tumour.

On the pitch it was all good. Roy returned, and if it weren't for the FAI splatterfest later in the year we would now be saying that his return put an end to the whole Saipan business. More importantly, though, Roy Keane integrated. The remarkable thing about his appearances since his return has been that there is nothing remarkable about them other than his quiet efficiency in midfield. No controversy.

Volcanically speaking he seems diminished, but he is still smart enough to wring another season or two from his whinging bones and that will be good, because a summer in Germany entices on two fronts. Another World Cup for Keane would be good for those of us who fondly remember his wonderful performances in the US 10 years ago, but this time he would be conducting a company that mightn't just include Damien Duff and Robbie Keane but also Andy Reid, Aiden McGeady, Stephen Elliot and Willo Flood.

Just thinking about that is a reason to be cheerful.

Careful though. Steady on. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first describe as "promising". Padraig Harrington has been promising for a decade now and almost every year he has delivered on that promise. So much so that he stands now on a hillock looking down on the trimmed fairways and manicured greens of what might be the promised land.

The heroic thing about Harrington is his fidelity to himself. Apart from the hirsute experimentation with beards and highlights, he is pretty much the most grounded golf professional on the Tour. Also the hardest working and the most ethical.

The year just behind him brought many good moments and another Ryder Cup win. Harrington loves the Ryder Cup and there will have been much joy attached to another win, but even he will quietly concede that until he wins a major his immense promise will be tantalisingly unconsummated.

He's at a crossroads now. Europe hems him in. He has been on Tour for a long time but remains happily fascinated with the nuts and bolts of his game. The sudden change of caddy last season suggests his awareness, though, of a need for some freshness to keep his obsession burning. With a son at home, his house built, his money made and almost everything in the game already achieved, it would be tempting to cruise a little. Spending as much time in America next year as he proposes too seems like a good idea. Prediction: that major comes in 2005.

AND SO DESPITE ourselves we get more upbeat. It's not right but we can't help it. Time to congratulate Eddie O'Sullivan on becoming Manager of the Year and - without damaging the spirit of rapprochement - time also to suggest that whoever was responsible for leaving Charlie Mulgrew off the list of monthly winners brought the whole Manager of the Year game into disrepute.

Not saying that Eddie's Triple Crown win wasn't as deserving of notice as a new Brian O'Driscoll hairdo, just suggesting that Charlie's achievement in putting back together a fragmented, inexperienced and dispirited Fermanagh side and getting them to the verge of the big dance was something to behold. Still, we predict greater things to come for Eddie in the coming years, possibly a World Cup win.

(Note. The author is notorious for knowing next to nothing about golf and rugby and much of what appears in the previous few paragraphs has been borrowed from other people's opinion columns under the auspices of an internationally recognised reciprocal agreement called The Internet. As such the author is not actually legally bound to stand over the opinions expressed and any reader wishing to place large wagers on the basis of the predictions contained therein, is advised that, legally speaking, you are on your own, baby).

Managers were perhaps the overriding theme of the GAA year. There was little novelty to the brand leaders in hurling and football notching another win each, but Cork's Donal O'Grady and Kerry's Jack O'Connor both pulled off remarkable feats to get their teams to the summit.

Then there was Páidí in Westmeath, an unlikely blind date which turned into something more. There was Brian Cody's raging passion on the sideline when his team played Galway, Justin McCarthy moving the pieces around the board, John Maughan and his unfinished business in Mayo, and in the end there was no Tommy Lyons or John O'Mahony.

Neither hurling nor football produced a great vintage but some good games and (in football) a little novelty kept things interesting. Fermanagh have been handed the sort of draw which qualifies as a penitential sentence in Ulster next year, but it would be a fine thing for the game were we to see them back in Croke Park, maybe tussling with Westmeath in a big one.

That hurling has been returned to the bluebloods as if it were their property is a matter which will give nobody great satisfaction, but there is nobody to blame except the county boards of second tier hurling counties. Cork and Kilkenny dominate because they do things better, they have structures, they have thoughtful people and they do what has to be done.

Everyone else ebbs and flows waiting for the tide to wash in a fine bunch of players who hopefully won't be wasted by neglect or wounded by drink.

Time to start appointing not just coaches but directors of hurling in some counties. Overseers. Strategists. Gangermen. Architects. Whatever.

(Coming up. How to pay these professionals for their services, plus a neat finish which ties in the sentiments of the opening paragraph to make the entire yearly review look as if it had some sort of central and unifying theme. By the way, it had not.)

Naturally the issue which will continue to haunt the GAA is Croke Park. The signs are that the work hasn't been done on the ground and behind the scenes to alter the views of fundamentalists.

Which is a pity. It is the GAA's unalienable right to do what it likes with Croke Park regardless of what fraction of public money went in its construction. The pity is that at this stage a great and confident organisation is still giving itself ulcers over this matter.

The retention of Rule 42 at next year's Congress will bring down a biblical shitstorm of opprobrium on the GAA, the general membership of which has neither umbrellas nor very strong opinions on the matter. It won't be pretty and it won't be fair, but the skies won't lighten until many moons after Ireland are forced to play the home leg of a World Cup qualifying play-off in some neutral venue.

To open up Croke Park would not be to submit to a process of humiliation. It would bring in several million yoyos over the next few years and, properly funnelled, that money would buy a lot of coaches and equipment for clubs. And when everything settles and the new Lansdowne Road gets built it would be surprising if rugby and soccer wanted to rent the place for more than one or two occasions a year. Would the men who once gathered in Hayes Hotel be spinning in their graves?

But that's all ahead of us. In the meantime the GAA needs not to feel bullied and harassed. The association needs to feel that it is valued as the primary exponent of how to use big-time sport as a nurturer of grass roots, it needs to know that the work it has done socially and culturally in every parish and townland is precious.

And then perhaps it can set about making 2005 the year of the big gesture. It would be sparkling and standard-setting and would leave us all feeling specifically inspired.

As we said, dreaming is free.