Tom Humphriesreckons the 2007 sporting year provided more than enough evidence to conclude the glass really is half empty

Listen. This business of reviewing the sporting year. No derogation? No let-off? No gimmes? Nowt? There should be some appeals system. A draft-deferment board for young men who don't feel the need to go to war. Maybe an amnesty whereby the hack submits a few happy paragraphs and is then considered to be review compliant.

Or the Sports Editor could play fair. Bring his six-shooter into the sports department. Ostentatiously place one bullet in the chamber. Spin that chamber. Place the pistol on the table. Spin the thing. Whoever the damn gun points to when it stops spinning picks it up and gets the choice of either reviewing the sporting year of 2007 or squeezing the trigger and perhaps making a hole in the head where no hole previously existed. (This is also a system which would cut out a lot of messing when it comes to the recruiting of Irish soccer managers.)

Let's face it, 2007 was a bum year. One long annus horribilis the ongoing pain of which was relieved only by the restoration of goodness represented by Pádraig Harrington's first major title. And the outcome of the Leinster club football championship.

Let's take stock. Our soccer team were a disaster. The boys in green were, we thought, unsurpassable in their mediocrity until the rugby team went to France and managed to get involved in cliffhangers with countries that we didn't know even played rugby.

The All-Irelands in hurling and football were drained of novelty and the finals won by the same teams who always win the finals. It's getting a little like that boat race that Oxford and Cambridge always get to the final of.

Bernard Dunne took a pasting in the boxing ring.

Jessica Kürten, a beacon in the murk of showjumping, got dragged somehow into that very murk. We don't know quite what to make of Kieren Fallon anymore.

We stand on the cusp of 2008 knowing in our hearts that apart from the cheap plastic toy that comes with a Happy Meal we will win nothing at the Beijing Olympics. And should we care if we don't? Marion Jones's fall from grace this year and the expunging of her Olympic records and the redistribution of her Olympic medals hammered another nail into the credibility of the Games in general and athletics in particular.

Let's start with the old dickory docker. We do so because no other sport delivers so much sizzle and so little substance to our plates. The Gaffer passed across our skies like a low-wattage comet which falls from view before we even knew what to make of it. Nothing about the Staunton era left a good taste or happy memories. We failed to get a place on the floor for the big dance next year, which is fine, but something else is amiss.

We don't feel about our players the way we used to. Perceptions have altered. Our players seem petulant, remote, spoiled, overpaid and underworked.

Obviously these are qualities that sportswriters in particular find hard to come to terms with but the sundering of the relationship between the team and the people who pay dearly to follow them has a lot to do with the contemptuous approach of players to the media and, by extension, the Irish soccer public.

The sense of gloom is of course heightened by the ongoing charade which is the recruitment process for An Gaffer Nua. The FAI have decided to take the Posse Approach to finding a new chap and John Delaney has asked three elderly gunslingers to saddle up and ride out of town and not come back till they have their man.

Unfortunately the boys have disappeared over the horizon and if their early telegrams back to us are an accurate reflection of their collective lack of inspiration in this matter perhaps it would be best if they don't come home at all.

There is an appetite among the Irish soccer public for something fresh, bold and imaginative. There is a need for a departure from the rinky-dink tradition. There is a feeling of contempt for the old familiar. The English model doesn't work.

It doesn't work for England. Ask Fabio. So, why are we trawling the unemployment centres of the English game looking for bargain-basement hacks when we should be girding our resources and making a more imaginative, more bold and more expensive appointment. The one thing the FAI won't be forgiven for is a lack of ambition. The one quality yet to be displayed in the current pantomime is ambition.

Watch this space for more bad news in 2008. The IRFU inoculated themselves against this type of humiliation by straitjacketing Eddie O'Sullivan into a four-year contract before they let him loose in France this autumn. Great and strangely chorus-like is the tut-tutting of the alickadoos over this misfired gamble and of course hindsight makes the song that much sweeter.

The rugby blazers probably deserve a pass on this one, though. Generally they don't put a foot outside touch. If the team had performed as expected they would have looked like shrewd men, having nailed down one of the hottest properties in the coaching of egg chasers.

Or course it didn't break that way and it is strange to reflect on a rugby year which began so hopefully with those landmark afternoons in Croke Park and ended in such flat discord.

With the soccer team ailing and the hurling and football championships a little bit stagnant there was a gap this year for rugby to continue its colonisation of the imagination of kids. Failure in France represented a lost opportunity. Rugby needs to build upon the increasingly excellent youth-development work done nationally and on the impact of Munster over the past few years.

That will happen, one suspects, and the World Cup and Eddie O'Sullivan's contract will be mere footnotes in the story of Irish rugby's ongoing transition.

No single organisation watches the growth of rugby with more alarm and fascination than does the GAA. For the Gael, the year finished messily too. The awarding of player grants was an inevitability probably from the time that Charlie McCreevy unnecessarily gave tax breaks to professional sportspeople living in this jurisdiction.

The idea was accepted in principle a long time ago by the GAA itself and anybody with any foresight knew two things. Firstly, there is absolutely no sustainable model of pay for play and with the grassroots' sense of revulsion about pay for play, the grants would represent one of the final pieces in a long-overdue overhaul of player welfare. And secondly, the GPA, whatever one's feelings about them, have played their part in this overhaul and were always going to indulge in a little grandstanding about the grants issue.

And yet the rubber-stamping of what has been inevitable for quite a long time has been greeted in some quarters like the surprise arrival at a dinner party of the of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Stop! The end isn't nigh. A less combative relationship between the GAA and the GPA should be the course of things over the next few years. That would be welcome and useful.

On the field, the GAA have enough to be worrying about. The hurling and football championships lack novelty and new faces right now. That isn't the fault of Kilkenny or Kerry, whose ongoing excellence is a model for other counties, but there are issues which need to be addressed.

Moves are afoot to give some primacy back to the club and some respect back to the club player. The poor, bedraggled, unfortunate club player is a creature more entitled to militant collective action than just about any other species in the GAA jungle.

There is good sense in this. A restructured, more rational championship season, a truncated league and an ethos which gave clubs the use of their own players would give some timely binding-together for the GAA as a whole.

There is no sustainable model of pay for play and no clear voice seeking the implementation of pay for play but a system where club players are whisked away for nine, 10, 11 months of the year for the use of county teams who advertise themselves constantly as professional in all but name is demoralising and damaging for clubs.

Current structures have also created a dangerous gulf between so-called elite players and the rest of the association. Time for the reassertion of old principles.

Kilkenny's and Kerry's All-Ireland wins in 2007 told us truths which buttress the arguments for a return to old ways. Both counties look after their grassroots. Both counties can claim the games of hurling and football respectively mean more within their borders than they do anywhere else.

The primacy of hurling in Kilkenny and football in Kerry owes less to the drive of an inspirational manager or the sudden availability of training funds filtered through an energised supporters club than to tradition and long-term investment right at the grassroots.

We were in Kilkenny a couple of weeks ago and were twice told exactly which hurling men were going through St Pat's teacher-training college at the moment and exactly how soon they would be returning home to work the fields.

Hopeful signs elsewhere? Dublin's hurling renaissance continues steadily and the capital is maybe half a decade away from substantial achievement. That would be a shot in the arm for hurling the like of which the sport has never known.

Ballyboden, this year's county hurling champions in the capital, are breakthrough winners and are an example yet again of the necessity of tending to the grassroots from mini-leagues and primary schools on up.

And of course it never rains but it pours. Ballyboden's win in Parnell Park was the club's second major championship of the summer, Harrington winning the British Open a few weeks previously in circumstances of such unprecedented excitement it is unlikely that even his grandchildren will ever tire of hearing the story recounted again and again.

In an Irish sporting world made murky by poor administration, too much money, too many rows and lots of bad behaviour, to an Irish sporting public made cynical by too many olé olé olé occasions and made fat by a diet of Sky Super Sundays, Pádraig Harrington is the pure drop.

We have many sporting stars to follow and to cover but very few real heroes, very few people operating at the top of their profession of whom it could be said their values and ethics are those that you would want your own children to follow and adhere to. Harrington's win was a victory for hard work, for persistence and for honesty. Harrington is so unassuming, so assiduous in his manners and his remembrance of duty, so faithful to the person he was reared to be, that perhaps we have failed as yet to appreciate the magnitude of his achievement.

The British Open was one of those occasions of quiet and genuine sporting happiness, a necessary antidote to the cynicism and emptiness of so much professional sport.

Such moments are few and far between. Summer had given us the adventures of the Irish cricketers, a good-news story the impact of which was diminished by its unfortunate absence from terrestrial television.

Autumn gave us welcome moments of happy reprieve thanks to Katie Taylor and the Wexford camogie team, whose All-Ireland win over Cork gave us as fine a game as we saw all year. Just enough in 2007 to give us a little hope but more than enough to justify the view of those who insist the glass is half empty.

And so an Olympic year dawns. Higher? Faster? Stronger? Irish sport?

Hmmmmmm! We'll get back to you on that if the six-shooter points to us next December.