Cracks of light bring joy and hope to sport
THERE is no day of the year that cannot be improved by the words of Patrick Kavanagh, but there is a particular elegance about him at Christmas. ‘A Christmas Childhood’ is the reason, an eloquent statement of his gift for capturing details familiar to Irish rural childhood memories through generations.
He was an enthusiastic if limited goalkeeper during his sporting years, but Kavanagh’s relevance here goes beyond that.
‘The light between the ricks of hay and straw / Was a hole in Heaven’s gable’ he writes, and that notion of hope enduring and finding its way through despite all encapsulates the Irish sporting year about to pass.
It is the one truth about sporting life that greed and cheating have not destroyed: the best get rewarded, the rest are left with their regrets.
And if the sporting environment does house an inordinate number of creeps and chancers, hope and beauty survive there, too.
The year 2017 contained enough reminders of that to make it possible to reflect with no little amount of satisfaction.
The headline achievement was the Dublin footballers winning three All-Ireland championships in a row. It confirmed them as the finest team since the last iteration of Kerry’s golden years 30 years ago, but they seem certain to be remembered as the greatest Dublin side we have so far seen.
Their winning is hardly done yet, but a proper consideration of their brilliance is distracted by daft rows over Jim Gavin and the attitude of some of his players. A tiresome soccer pundit suggested on radio that some of Gavin’s players had bad attitudes, while the decision to give the manager-of-the-year award to Micheál Donoghue has been taken as a grievous insult by excitable Dublin supporters.
It was absurd that the nature of how Gavin celebrated Dublin’s win last September, after a captivating final against Mayo, became a story, rather than the fact that he is a tremendous manager who chooses not to turn great days for his team into dramas with himself in a central role.
Such rows are now nothing more than white noise, and at year’s end the magnificent team Gavin has assembled can be hailed by anyone willing to acknowledge greatness in their midst.
The historical status of Donoghue’s Galway team is not settled yet, but their win in the hurling final was a day of sweeping romance and poignancy, too.
The death of Tony Keady so close to the final, and the determination of the manager and his players to accommodate the Keady family in their celebrations afterwards, rooted their story in the heartbreak and challenges of everyday life, making it recognisable to everyone, not just those with Galway in their souls on that September day.
There was a grittier side to this victory as well. The county’s hurlers have been pilloried for years, and it was only two years ago that critics were hanging out of disorderly queues to splatter them with insults and calumnies.
Under Donoghue’s studied, dignified leadership – very similar to Gavin’s, incidentally – Galway committed themselves to maintaining the standards required in a sport distinguished now by unrelenting physical exchanges borrowed from football, as well as its more celebrated traditional skills.
Hurling is a frontier waiting to be claimed since the decline of Kilkenny, and Tipperary have so far proven unable to settle the territory. Galway look well-fitted to keep it for at least one more year.
Effort, of course, is not enough, and if it finds some reward in sport, it is not enough on its own to secure the biggest rewards. The national soccer team is proof of that.
Martin O’Neill’s men will never be found guilty of deserting their posts, but the side is desperately compromised by the absence of quality.
One high-calibre player can be the difference in tight matches, as Denmark showed, but in the absence of one of those, organisation and determination will remain critical to Ireland’s chances – no matter who is in charge.
It seems likely to be O’Neill for at least one more campaign, and he has earned the right to another go.
Sport rewarded excellence by Irish rowers. Katie Taylor continued to overcome the limitations of her pursuit to maintain enormous levels of popularity among the public, and the O’Briens were Ireland’s great champions on a global scale through 2017.
The Conor McGregor story, never a convincing sporting one, degenerated into outright celebrity, and if it remains there it will be no crushing loss to the back pages.
There are truer examples of greatness to enjoy.
Happy Christmas.