The bitterest pill

Ah, this sporting year. And what a year it has been, with fewer surprises than the average Dido album.

I suppose we should start with the football, specifically the bit pertaining to Ireland, whose brief revival under Brian Kerr petered out with a whimperingly poor defeat in Basle against a Swiss team that you just know are going to have the tar whaled out of them in the Euro 2004 finals. As I type, Ireland have drawn the Swiss again in the World Cup qualifiers. And France.
Elsewhere, England qualified for Portugal with a grisly nil-niller in Istanbul, while Scotland managed their best result in years (1-0 v Holland), which was swiftly followed by their worst (0-6 v Holland). Northern Ireland, meanwhile, rendered all satire redundant by failing to score for the entirety of their Euro 2004 group.
Man United wrested back the title from Arsenal, who were simply too perfect a side to be something as mundane as English champions. Then Chelsea, or rather their mysterious new Russian billionaire owner, threw a spanner in the works by lashing out £111 million on twelve new players, some of whom were even rather good. The long-term consequences of the Blues’ attempt to turn the Premiership into a fiscal arms race have yet to be witnessed, though their early season performances have at least proved beyond all doubt that there is no discernible point in Juan Veron continuing to play in English football.
United’s home ground witnessed the worst European Cup final since the non-aggression pact of 1991. Milan and Juventus stank the place out with two hours of footballing poker that produced a grand total of one goalmouth incident (Andriy Shevchenko, one of the few participants with a pulse, seeing it ruled out for offside). Even the inevitable penalties were crap, with most of the big names bottling the chance to take one. No more, please.
In Scotland, Rangers papered over the cracks, and won the battle but lost the war in comprehensive fashion. After taking the SPL title by one measly fucking goal, they bombed miserably out of the Champions League and slipped five points behind their enemies in the table. With the erstwhile heartbeat of their side, Barry Ferguson, busy dying a death at Blackburn, they look ill equipped to match Celtic’s blend of muscle and speed, let alone surpass it. (And let’s hope this comment can’t be thrown back at me in May.)
For their own part, Celtic astounded everyone, not least themselves, by going on the mother and father of all runs in the UEFA Cup, breaking Blackburn, Liverpool, Celta Vigo and Stuttgart over their knee before being brought to heel by a technically superior Porto side in a pulsating final. I will refrain, however, from waxing lyrical over their recent Champions League performances, given that by the time you read this they will probably have died roaring at the hands of Olympique Lyonnais.
The rugby World Cup could best be summed up with an image of an Adidas boot — specifically Jonny Wilkinson’s left boot — stamping on a human face forever (with apologies to George Orwell). A disciplined and courageous but hardly coruscating England team relied on the blank-faced one for virtually all their points in a disappointing tournament that was won, fittingly, by an opportunistic drop goal after some grinding forward play.
Ireland were Ireland, occasionally deigning to provide a flourish but always found wanting when the real questions were asked. 37-0 down to France with half an hour left in the quarter-final, they at least signed off with a few tries, something which seems to be beyond this England side, for all its undoubted virtues.
Of this year’s Irish hopefuls in the Heineken Cup, Munster crashed out to eventual winners Toulouse in the semi-final in curiously lifeless fashion. This may or may not have been a hangover from their exertions in the previous round, when they faced Leicester at Welford Road in a tie given extra spice by Neil Back’s disgraceful antics the previous year, and promptly wellied the shite out of them. Leinster’s defeat by Perpignan, meanwhile, was notable mainly for the astonishing torpor of the occasion, with the silence at Lansdowne broken only by the rustle of crisp packets and the noise of kids playing outside the ground. This was actually a rather eloquent comment on the awfulness of the game itself.
Everywhere you looked in 2003, it was more of the same ould shite. Michael Schumacher again turned Formula 1 into a succession of tedious practice laps; the Williams sisters continued their quest to reduce women’s tennis to a private family function; and athlete after athlete tested positive for the new designer steroid tetrahydrogestrinone, which one hopes is easier to digest than it is to type.
The news coverage of this last development periodically veered into the realms of low farce, with sentences like “American athletes have unanimously backed lifetime bans for steroid use and called on the rest of the world to adopt a zero tolerance policy” being written presumably straight-facedly. There is now every likelihood of the Athens Olympics, or at least the track & field end of it, being an even bigger waste of time than usual.
The All-Ireland hurling final was between Kilkenny and Cork, neither of whom could be said to be bringing the shock of the new to the occasion, and the only real surprise was that the Rebels gave the far superior Kilkenny a bit of a game before being overwhelmed in the final minutes. At least the Sam Maguire was claimed by a new county, Tyrone, though the crude, unsightly manner in which they won their semi and the final turned off many observers who’d previously been championing their attack-oriented style of play.
All the more reason to hope that in 2004, the also-rans and unfancied runners — the Laoises and Limericks, the Juan Montoyas, the Newcastle Uniteds, the Samoas, the Kim Clijsterses — can trouble the established order a little more, or at the very least shake things up a bit before we all fall asleep. Otherwise, wake me when it’s over.