It's getting lonely round the fields of Athenry

Rugby: A year that began so well and reached unforgettable heights one epic spring evening in Croke Park has trundled to a messy and uncertain end, but at least we still have Munster to warm the cockles, writes Gerry Thornley.

Compared to Irish rugby of the 1990s, we don't do dull years any more. That mantle seems to have passed on to Scotland for the time being. Heaven forbid the dull years return, and while ultimately the Irish rugby year ended on a crushingly anti-climactic note, it's remarkable to recall that it contained one of the highs of all time.

At the recent Philips Manager of the Year Awards, there were sundry reminders that if a week is a long time in politics, well, you've heard it before. Stephen Kenny was the inaugural monthly winner for achievements with Derry City, since when he tried his hand in Scotland and has returned with a cautionary tale to tell. Even Roy Keane's April reward was put in perspective by his current relegation battle with Sunderland.

And then there was Eddie O'Sullivan, like Keane not in attendance at the awards. He had been the February winner. Richly merited it was too. Ten months ago. It feels like a month of Sundays since.

Irish rugby began the year with all three provinces still in contention in the Heineken European Cup but Ulster having lost twice on the road, to Llanelli and London Irish. In the event, they were soundly beaten in a Ravenhill gale as Llanelli put paid to their chances.

Leinster avenged their last-ditch defeat away to Edinburgh without Brian O'Driscoll at Donnybrook, but hopes of a home quarter-final were ended on a torrid night in Kingsholm against a vengeful Gloucester.

For their part, Munster survived an unusually harum-scarum afternoon in Geneva against a Bourgoin side unusually interested in a dead rubber before hosting Leicester in a pool decider at Thomond Park.

In a masterfully devised and enacted Pat Howard game plan, the fired-up Tigers protected their stand-in outhalf, Ian Humphreys, and led most of the way thanks to a well-taken try by, inevitably, an assured Geordan Murphy, thereby rendering redundant debates as to where either Irish province might have hosted a home quarter-final.

As Declan Kidney dryly noted, "I suppose the politicians will be happy now because there was a lot of nonsense talked during the week about where we were going to play home quarter-finals. I don't think any player from either Leinster or Munster fed into that from the word go.

"But we knew we never had a divine right to win matches here. You can look upon it negatively and say, 'yes, we did lose out today' or you can look upon it positively and say how great that makes all the other wins. Today it sucks, but we just have to pull up our socks and get on with it."

The net effect was that Munster and Leinster were pitched into difficult quarter-finals away to Llanelli and Wasps.

Perhaps the edge had been taken from Munster's final pool game by having already qualified, whereas Leicester were fighting for their lives, but either way the least-penetrable ramparts of Irish rugby were stormed to end Munster's European 26-match winning run at Thomond Park on its last day before being knocked down and rebuilt. Perhaps the seeds of doubt were sown in the Irish rugby psyche that day too.

So to the Six Nations. Ireland were far from fluent in a hard-earned 19-9 win in Cardiff and entertained France without the injured O'Driscoll and Peter Stringer, who had missed only one Six Nations game since his debut against the Scots in 2000. Eddie O'Sullivan attributed the anti-climactic 20-17 defeat to "a bounce of the ball" and has clearly still not forgiven Murphy for his missed tackle on Raphaël Ibañez.

In truth, the Ibañez try was reward for a much more assured start by the French, and deep though the Irish forwards dug for Ronan O'Gara to kick Ireland in front with three minutes left, the hanging Lionel Beauxis restart, Jerome Thion's chase and tap infield, Yannick Jauzion's quick reactions, the patience France showed in penetrating out wide and recycling the ball, and Vincent Clerc's opportunism in taking his try went well beyond a bounce of the ball.

The real fear lurked that Ireland's much-trumpeted arrival in Croke Park would thus end with two defeats when England came calling a fortnight later after their opening wins over Italy and Scotland inspired by a certain Jonny Wilkinson under their new head coach, Brian Ashton.

Of course nothing concentrates Irish players' minds like the thought of impending disaster or the prospect of playing a certain team in all white.

O'Driscoll and Stringer were back too.

Ireland were perfectly primed, at full strength, rested the weekend before and focused to an incredible degree.

Ashton, his squad already ravaged, had seen his leading club sides play six days before, thereby granting him just one full training session in preparation.

He who pays the piper calls the tune, so television had decreed that, whereas the French game had been played on a Sunday afternoon, the English game would have a Saturday tea-time slot. More time for pre-match lubrication, the buzz of a floodlit game - and no getting up for work the next day.

All this was tempered by the increasingly rabid build-up on phone-in radio and some small parts of the media about anti-English protests and the response to God Save the Queen being played at the hallowed ground.

Carlsberg don't do rugby days, but if they did . . . In the event, the crowd's respect was exemplary, earning the applause of Martin Corry in a classy touch. A few minutes of spine-tingling were replaced by 80 minutes of the same. Paul O'Connell's virtuoso display; Shane Horgan's try from Ronan O'Gara's crosskick; a superpower being put to the sword, 43-13, like never before.

Those who were there will recount it for ever more. Eight-hundred years of pain, 80 minutes of pleasure, as one wag put it. The force with Ireland was primeval and mystical.

"We owed everybody a victory. We owed ourselves, we owed the Irish rugby public and we owed the GAA, who opened the doors to Croke Park," said O'Sullivan, who pressed all the right buttons before and after the game. "That brings pressure, and I'm very happy that the team did deliver a performance under pressure that was even better than we expected."

Nothing could top that, and Ronan O'Gara keeping his nerve to bail the team out of another Murrayfield jail didn't.

There was verve and some stupendous tries among the eight in Rome but the subsequent championship finale in Paris saw Ireland miss out on the title in the last play of the campaign when a questionable if probable try by Elvis Vermeulen was granted by an Irish TMO, Simon McDowell.

The year began to unravel more dramatically two weeks later when Munster were stunned by the Harlem Scarlets in Stradey Park and Leinster were rolled over by Wasps in the second half a day later in Adams Park.

With that, O'Sullivan decreed the 15 starting heroes against England would be wrapped in cotton wool for the Argentinian tour and in cold storage in Spala in the pre-season, Leinster keeping Irish interest alive in the Magners League only to be roundly pilloried for not closing out the deal.

The two tests against the Pumas in the land of the pampas scarcely merit a footnote in a year, never mind history. The tour served to earn Alan Quinlan, Stephen Ferris and Brian Carney places in the World Cup squad, and they probably wish it hadn't.

The warm-up games against Scotland, Bayonne and Italy had been ample warning.

The scratchy 32-17 win over Namibia sent tremors through fans, squad and, most of all, management. Instinctively conservative in this time of gathering crisis, O'Sullivan reverted to type and the formula for previous success - the same players and team and the exact same training - and hoped things would come right against Georgia.

When they didn't, and only Denis Leamy's body and Georgia's lack of a goalkicker saved Ireland from the most embarrassing defeat in their history, O'Sullivan had backed himself into a corner.

It was too late to make wholesale changes, but instead of freshening things up, he dropped his winger and his scrumhalf from the 22 and, almost spitefully, it seemed, the most versatile player at any Irish coach's disposal from the bench after just one minute's rugby in the previous two games.

There had been brief respite while beholding Argentina's stunning opening-night win over France and Les Bleus' restorative thrashing of Namibia.

By the time Ireland played France only the hosts' greater cause for agitation provided hope, for Ireland looked like a busted flush.

After Vincent Clerc struck again and Ireland crashed 25-3, the feeling hardened in advance of playing the rampant Pumas.

They won pulling away, "hoofing it down the middle" as O'Sullivan put it.

But that was entirely predictable, all the more so as the onus was on Ireland to score a barely credible four tries. Yet still Ireland had no counterattacking strategy. The Pumas' pack pummelled away with remorseless strength and control, Agustin Pichot was the puppet master, Juan Martín Hernández strutted his stuff, and their second try, off his kick and catch and hands across the line to the amateur Horacio Agulla, was one of the tries of the tournament.

It is now clear that rather than the bushfire of rumours concerning rifts and infighting, there was no outstanding factor in Ireland's utter non-show. Yes, they lacked match practice, but so did everyone else to varying degrees - Argentina, England and France as much as Ireland.

Physically something went wrong, for they continually suffered in the collisions, and even the glossed-over IRFU/Genesis review underlines the impression the squad were too cut off and overtrained.

Most pertinently of all, in terms of strategy, planning, coaching and selection, the World Cup was a failure.

Further respite came by way of the quarter-final in Cardiff, witnessed by possibly 10,000-plus Irish supporters (oh yeah, forgot about them too). Cue the moment, 13 minutes in, when The Fields of Athenry echoed around the Millennium Stadium. A dignified reminder of the Irish presence there that memorable night and what might have been.

Sebastien Chabal and co had stood up to the haka in choreographed blue, white and red, with the All Blacks in a less-intimidating all grey with black bits, and galvanised by a fear akin to Buster Douglas v Mike Tyson, producing probably the most inspired and compelling defensive performance in World Cup history, albeit with a vintage dash of Freddy Michalak- and Toulouse-inspired flair to get them into a winning position.

Alas, the dream died against the gnarled, grizzled English warhorses, as did Argentina's against the ultra-pragmatic Springboks, leaving Los Pumas with the consolation of breaking French spirits and then breaking free in their third-place play-off rout of the truly embarrassed hosts. Cue, most certainly, the party of the tournament.

Though England were panned globally and in this country, Ireland would probably have gobbled up a similar outcome. In the event the final was predictably a bridge too far against a Springboks side playing percentage rugby from the front and doing no more than they had to do. And that made them the champs, having beaten England twice and Argentina and been given scares by Tonga and Fiji. No games against the hosts or their heavyweight Southern Hemisphere neighbours. A funny oul' World Cup in a funny oul' year.

The post-World Cup cure has been piecemeal and is largely down to Munster's capacity to play like a band of brothers whenever their backs are to the wall. Though they weren't as ruthless as they could have been away to Wasps, they were at home to Clermont and dug deep in their moments of crisis back-to-back against Llanelli.

There was a familiar postscript to Leinster's calendar year, with another but even more dispiriting Euro defeat to an Edinburgh side rejuvenated by Andy Robinson. The form of Brian O'Driscoll and Leinster's other Irish backs compounds the fears about the year ahead.

The English game and Ashton's stature have been revived, while France, Italy and Wales are all beginning four-year cycles under new regimes. Meantime, for all the many highs and improvements wrought by the O'Sullivan era, it simply looks as if it is living beyond its sell-by date.

A funny oul' year indeed, but as long as Munster are alive the dull days may yet be staved off.

What we already knew . . .

Munster were reigning European champions, while Ireland had the big two of France and England coming to Croke Park, and therefore had their best chance since 1985 of winning the Six Nations title, before travelling to the World Cup as genuine contenders.

What we learned . . .

A rollercoaster Six Nations campaign contained the let-down of losing to France, the Croker crushing of England, the ugly win in Edinburgh and the Patrick's Day carnival of tries in Rome only for Ireland to miss out on the championship, before quarter-final exits for Munster and Leinster precipitated the mother of all anticlimaxes at the World Cup.

What might happen . . .

As long as Munster keep the flag flying in Europe, hope springs eternal, but the downturn in form of the game-breaking Leinster backs and the Ulster fringe players does not augur well.