We’ve ordered according to interest, not medals
SHOULD you come here in search of a green jersey, then brace yourself for disappointment. With this list, we try to present a rounded take on Irish sport over the past 100 years. Were it a ‘Best of’ presentation, we could all kick back, rustle among the coffee and orange-flavoured sweets in vain search of a tasty survivor, and luxuriate in Stuttgart and Sonia.
The good times do abound, and there are many incidents in the compilation that would make a person marvel at how our stubborn little rock in the maw of the Atlantic has produced such stars.
But the more turbulent days are important too. In this selection we have ordered not according to medals but interest, featuring the events that have made people talk and keep talking. Sport is defined by winning, but that cannot be the only point. Were it so, then most supporters and participants would turn away very quickly.
No, sport is also about stoking controversy, kindling debate and moving people in a way the other parts of their lives cannot.
The most infamous row in Irish sporting history, and one of the most contentious arguments in Irish history full stop, comes out as most significant in this accounting of a century of our nation’s sport.
Bloody Sunday is centrally important to any consideration of a century of Irish sport, but it can no longer be kept alive by the memories of people who lived through that time. Instead, it is now a monument to murder, resistance and the remarkable durability of the GAA.
Its cultural importance can never be questioned.
Saipan is powerful as a story because it happened in recent memory. The impact that a row between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy had on the country is staggering to recall 14 years later. But the repercussions tremored far beyond Ireland.
It is now faithfully retold that a report of Keane’s departure from the 2002 World Cup made the front page of the Delhi Times, and this at a time when India and Pakistan were involved in a stand-off that carried the risk of a war between the countries. Whether that is true or not, we believed it could be at the time. Many still do.
In the most famous competition in the most popular sport in the world, Ireland, for a few days, made international headlines. And it smouldered nationally for years afterwards.
Saipan is now a one-word invocation of days of thunder. It summons memories of screeching talk-radio rows, of prime-time news interviews, of disputes in a thousand workplaces. It was, and remains, extraordinary.
Bloody Sunday had no great international impact, but its importance to the most powerful cultural institution Ireland has known is immense.
By targeting Croke Park on Sunday, November 21, 1920, the British forces in Ireland acknowledged the importance of the GAA.
Fourteen people were murdered attending a football challenge match between Tipperary and Dublin, killed at the hands of the RIC, Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans. It was a reprisal for the murder earlier that morning of 14 British intelligence officers by the IRA.
For an angry and frightened British force in Dublin, Croke Park was an obvious target. The determination of the GAA to remain non-political and non-sectarian was vigorously upheld, but the nuances in different expressions of Irish nationalism were not respected that disastrous afternoon.
The leadership required in its aftermath to stop the GAA being hijacked and weaponised as part of a larger political fight was astonishing.
The events of Bloody Sunday have never been forgotten, this most obviously manifested in a stand being named after slain Tipperary player Michael Hogan. But the GAA emerged from its worst day and stayed faithful to an ambition to accommodate anyone in Irish society who wished to be a part of it.
Turmoil and conflict rattle at the centre of most interesting sporting stories, as the kidnap of Shergar, the Michelle Smith debacle and the Lansdowne Road riots also illustrate. Turmoil must have raged in the young head of Rory McIlroy on the afternoon he disintegrated in Augusta. There are sweeter manifestations of big sports stories here, of course. When Packie Bonner dived and Ray Houghton nodded, Ireland was seized by tremendous joy. OK, Ronan O’Gara’s drop goal was not quite on that scale, but it still stands as one of the vivid successes of modern Irish sport. It is important because it provided tangible proof of Ireland’s emergence from years of backward huffing and puffing into a modern rugby force, evidence of a team at ease with the precise, punitive demands of today.
THERE will be no widespread agreement on the make-up of our selection. Some may argue there is no point in measuring one code, one era, one star against another, that sport does not heed order like that.
And yet supporters of all sports submit to the urge to categorise, to argue over what deed is greatest in any given year or season. Think of the controversy that attended the RTÉ awards last month, for instance.
This is also a way of recognising the excellence that Ireland can produce, be it in the domestic passions of the GAA and racing seasons, or internationally at an Olympics, Six Nations or the big soccer tournaments.
Ireland as an economy and a society has waxed and waned over 100 years, many feeling it has mostly waned where their lives are concerned.
But through the leanest of times, sport has been there, a crucible of controversy and contention and, occasionally, the purest of joy.
Throughout a bruising, sometimes joyful century, it has generated one thing always: drama.