For all hurlers on the ditch, armchair experts and the millions confused by RTÉs take on the sporting year, Tom Humphriespresents his revolutionary multiple-choice format, which can blank out what you don't like and rewrite history according to your private agenda

Guess what? As if the sheer drudge of Christmas wasn't enough, as if the over-extension of your credit card wasn't sufficient, as if the hangover pounding inside your head wasn't loud enough, as if your performance at the Christmas party wasn't cringeworthy enough, as if the clergy attacking poor Podge and Rodge wasn't depressing enough, here's the annual look back at the sporting year.

As Zinedine might say, "Allez, if you think you're hard enough." You know by now how this review gimmick works. In the first or second paragraph the writer sets out his stall and pronounces that the year which will soon be laid to rest was in fact:

A. A wonderful year for Irish sport.

B: A depressing year for Irish sport.

C: Alright until the Ryder Cup happened.

The writer than hops about as agitated as a Dundalk fan being offered a light. He gathers up various bits and pieces which with a little bending and cramming he can make fit into the general, overarching theme. Again, as Zinedine might say, et voila! Une annus horribilis! Nobody's perfect. Quite often the conclusions reached by the desolate hack forced to perform this seasonal autopsy will be quite at variance with the feelings of those who knew the year well.

Readers who feel the year has been short-changed and given a bad rap or indeed readers who feel the year is being (as The Irish Times letter writers often put it) bigged up are usually reminded that the author has spent some 20 minutes or so googling and is therefore an unimpeachable authority on "the year". At least that's the way it used to be. Technology and the embarrassing fact of having no firm opinions at all about the year just gone by have enabled us to introduce a revolutionary new format to the tired old "year in review" staple.

There'll still be sentimentality and bad jokes, but you the reader get to decide what sort of a year it was. That's right, finally you can adjust your own posterity.

Lets start, for illustration purposes, with an old-style subjective event at years end, namely, RTÉ's quaint li'l Sports Person of the Year Awards. In the primitive manner of these things, RTÉ wheeled out its wrinkly faces and they duly told the nation what to think about the year just elapsed.

Even the personality-of-the-year gong wasn't left to the whims of democracy but was decided upon by six experts in monkey suits. Humbug! With The Irish Times new patent "Year in Review" gizmo you can alter your memories of this ghastly event to suit your own prejudices. Brace yourself, Bridie!

So, the Sports Person of the Year shindig ended with athletics guru Jerry Kiernan:

A. Being outvoted in a contrived, undemocratic "debate".

B. Getting his mullet in a twist.

C. Shifting Eamon Dunphy.

See how it works?

Now then, Jerry is a key part of:

A. RTÉ's entertaining and eloquent coterie of studio experts.

B. The grumpy-old-men theme running through RTÉ's sports coverage.

C. The Bay City Rollers fan club.

While Derval O'Rourke is:

A. The future of Irish athletics.

B. The latest in a long line of overhyped Irish sweaty types.

C. Somebody you only recently heard of (if you're Ted Walsh).

In defence of Derval O'Rourke's claims to gongdom, Jerry found himself making the slightly colonial argument that he judges Irish sportspeople by how they fare abroad. He is a proponent of external validation.

Jerry was speaking as it became apparent that Henry Shefflin (who is: A. Peerless in the world's most skilful sport; B. Just a hurler for god's sake; C. Ginger) was going to pip Derval O'Rourke for the Irish Sports Person of the Year bauble.

All awards are subjective and not worth getting into a great lather about, but it struck us as somewhat poignant that so astute an expert as Jerry wouldn't be able to judge excellence on its own merits.

There are many reasons why giving this award to Henry Shefflin was a good and confident decision and many reasons why Derval O'Rourke won't be too bothered by it. Athletics, as Jerry knows, is:

A. Thoroughly discredited by its in-house community of cheats and enablers.

B. For those who were poor at team sports.

C. So, like, over.

And as such athletics no longer means much to the Irish public, who are fond of:

A. Their indigenous sports and the dickory docker.

B. Occasions of triple ole jollity like the Heino and the Royder.

C. Drink.

Henry Shefflin on the other hand has given many years of excellence in a sport which is increasingly the domain of younger men, he has hurled long and epic seasons just about every year, and this year on his shoulders Kilkenny went unbeaten and Ballyhale were reborn. For being a genius in his prime, Shefflin was a worthy winner and his award was a triumph for:

A. A great indigenous sport.

B. Mankind.

C. Hurray Henrys everywhere.

And so what if Henry plays an indigenous sport? Could Babe Ruth or Dan Marino never have won a US Sport Personality award? Since its inception in 1954, the Sports Illustrated Sports Person of the Year Award has gone 26 times to baseball, gridiron or NBA players. Could so many smart, literate Americans:

A. Be wrong.

B. Be right.

C. Be a contradiction in terms.

Derval O'Rourke is a talent and, better than that, she is an athlete just coming into her prime.

Anyone watching her sport closely though knows that the fields she beat at the World Indoors and the European Championship bear very little relationship to an Olympic final field.

Indeed none of the final line-up in Gothenburg were on their marks for the Olympic final in Athens in 2004. From the World Indoor final only Lacena Golding-Clarke survived. The big names were elsewhere and it's the big names whom Derval O'Rourke will have her eyes on taking down.

Derval achieved a national record of 12:72 seconds in Gothenburg. Five practising Americans have run under that time, and four of them (Michelle Perry, Joanna Hayes, Virginia Powell and Damu Cherry) have been under the critical 12:5-second mark. Throw in a couple of ageing Jamaicans and that's what's out there.

Fairly or unfairly, for the couch potato there are three things that matter in the world of athletics:

A. The Olympics.

B. The Olympic Games.

C. The Games of the Olympiad.

When we get to Beijing it will be 52 years since we have won a track gold medal.

In this regard, Derval O'Rourke is well placed. There are younger and very talented runners like Nigeria's Josephine Onyia, Australia's Sally McLellan and Cuba's Anay Tejeda coming up from behind but O'Rourke is the second-youngest runner in the world's top-10 rankings. Let's allow her go about her business without the burden of our gongs and our great expectations.

Speaking of athletics, we were reminded the other day of the old joke about the female athlete who went to her coach and said she was worried about the drugs he had been giving her as she had started to get hair on her chest.

"Hmm," said the coach, "it can be a side effect. How low down does the hair go?"

"Well, that's something else we need to talk about. It goes right down to my testicles."

What prompted this? Well an Indian runner who won a silver medal in the women's 800 metres at the Asian Games failed a gender test and was stripped of the medal. Santhi Soundarajan, 25, took the gender test in Doha, Qatar, after placing second. What next?

Anyway back to King Henry. Henry's fourth All-Ireland medal came at the end of a year which hurling purists regarded as:

A. Crowned by the glorious blessing, a Cork versus Kilkenny final.

B. Lacking in novelty.

C. Not up to international standards.

Kilkenny were the story of the year, remaining unbeaten and reinventing themselves while Cork hovered at roughly the same level of excellence. For Shefflin, his first All-Ireland won without the company of DJ Carey suggested that he will be judged as being at least the equal of the Gowran man and, if his career has sufficient length, possibly as the greatest of all the stripy men.

Hurling is in a curious place, however, and Kilkenny's re-emergence at the top of the heap serves only to make us wonder why it takes so long for everyone else to copy and implement an effective model of development.

As it is, the game suffers from:

A. Repetitive stress.

B. The morose bleatings of in-house fatalists.

C. Jerry Kiernan.

The hurling was good this summer but the game is parched for lack of novelty just now. Kilkenny and Cork have achieved levels of attainment which make them reliable bets in the company of just about any other counties.

Wexford went out with a characteristic whimper, Waterford beguiled us again, Galway got lost, Clare didn't take that extra step forward, Offaly flattered to deceive early on, and the Ulster championship degenerated into farce.

Paudie Butler's greatest challenge in terms of developing the game will be to get some uniformity into the underage efforts of county boards around the country and to spark some sort of life into schools outside the hurling territory.

Meanwhile next season cries out for:

A. Dublin in a Leinster final.

B. Ger Loughnane in full flight and Dublin in a Leinster final.

C. Waterford in an All-Ireland final and Dublin in a Leinster final.

Kilkenny's reinstatement to the throne coincided neatly with Kerry's return to glory. Kerry and Kilkenny have much in common, but mainly they thrive through having:

A. Traditions of excellence.

B. No real interest in the other Gaelic code.

C. Supporters who'll turn on their own if the going gets rough.

Kerry's All-Ireland win was a surprisingly compelling story in that they almost perished on the voyage but ended up playing some of the finest football seen in Croke Park in recent years.

Otherwise the story of the year was:

A. Tyrone's impossible luck with injuries.

B. Dublin falling apart like a cheap suit.

C. The dissolution of the marriage of Mickey Moran and John Morrison, with neither getting custody of the team.

Kieran Donaghy materialised as the most revolutionary of players. The big full forward and his astonishing season reached a zenith with the slaying of Francie Bellew. Happier still was his open and confident manner with the media.

Donaghy gave interviews and was pleasant and available and accommodating, and, hey, the roof didn't fall in on him. Hopefully, the game has a sustainable star.

The predictions for next year:

A. All teams playing Dublin to warm up at the Hill end.

B. All Dublin games to be played outside pub opening hours.

C. Teams to abandon slavish copying of the Northern style in favour of slavish copying of big-full-forward ploy.

Speeding on then. While the GAA was ducking behind a wall avoiding the slings and arrows of the deadeye dicks in the temperance movement who feel the root of all evil is the Guinness sponsorship of the hurling championships, full dispensation was given to practitioners of rugby and golf to revel in the Heino and to drink as much as humanly possible in the aftermath of the Ryder Cup.

The rugby year was notable not least for:

A. Munster's achievements in the Heino.

B. The Triple Crown.

C. Brian O'Driscoll breaking up with that Glenda from the Herald.

(We note by the way that the phrase Triple Crown was first used in this newspaper in 1894, when it was written: "After long years of seemingly hopeless struggle Ireland has achieved the triple crown honours of Rugby football. For the first time in the annals of the game have the Hibernians proved beyond cavil or doubt their right to be dubbed champions of the nations and that the Irishmen fully deserve the great distinction no one will deny . . . Hurrah for Hibernia!")

Times have changed of course and what put Ireland's current wellbeing beyond cavil or doubt was the quiet efficiency of the autumn campaign when the chaps went about dispatching tanned Southern Hemisphere types without fuss or excessive celebration.

As for Munster and their inexorable progress through the Heineken Cup, we must say they seem like nice fellows and there's no harm in it at all and the atmosphere in Thomond seems genuinely passionate. What is more difficult to understand is:

A. Why Ireland gets to put whole provinces into a club competition.

B. How it all became such a big publishing boom.

C. What happened to the hatred between Young Munster and Garryowen. Has that just been forgotten about?

Munster, more so even than the Irish national team, have been an incredible marketing tool for rugby in the past few years. There are lessons to be learned for every sport in rugby's ability to manufacture an entirely new competition and invest in it enough meaning to get thousands of people out on the streets of Limerick:

A. To watch the final.

B. To welcome the team home.

C. Without too many stabbings.

Perhaps the theme of 2006 is that all the best sport is local. What for instance do we recall of the first of this year's two global sporting events?

A. Very little, to be honest.

B. Zidane getting sent off.

C. I give up.

At the great extravaganza on slipping and sliding which constitutes the Winter Olympics, Austria (of course, of course!) won a record 14 alpine skiing medals! This achievement included a clean sweep in the

A. Slalom.

B. Yodelling.

C. Nuremburg trials.

At the closing ceremony in Turin, International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge pledged to pursue the war against doping with:

A. Unrelenting vigour.

B. A song in his heart.

C. Use of stimulants.

Which brings us to the Tour de France, an ever more amusing charade which regardless of your opinion of Lance Armstrong's feats and manners has managed to rut its wheels even deeper into the mire. Floyd Landis kept cycling's bad reputation alive by becoming the year's highest-profile drugs bust, just pipping Olympic 100-metre champ Justin Gatlin in a field which briefly included Marion Jones.

You will remember Ms Jones, whose A sample at the US championships was found to be fizzing with testosterone, but whose B sample was, depending on who you believe, either as clean as a whistle or deteriorated through bad storage. This was:

A. Just an odd thing to happen.

B. A major setback to drug-testing credibility.

C. Very handy for Marion.

Doping even spread to the gentle swards and pleasant tea-rooms of international cricket, when Pakistan pace bowlers Shoaib Akhtar and Mohammad Asif tested positive for the steroid nandrolone. Having been penalised for alleged ball tampering, the Pakistanis stood in a corner and refused to play against England, who themselves went and gave the Ashes back to the Aussies in double-quick time over the past few weeks.

So what have we left. Any heroes? Boxing, that sport disfigured by agents and spivs, suddenly looks like giving us a handful of homegrowns. Bernard Dunne. John Duddy. Andy Lee and Katie Taylor all gave us great moments in the sweet science.

Jessica Kürten continues to excel in the murky world of showjumping.

Padraig Harrington stands tall, but his European Order of Merit triumph served in a cruel way to underline how much we have come to expect of him. Harrington remains pretty much the most grounded golf professional on the Tour. Also the hardest working and the most ethical.

He's not picking up any awards this Christmas, though, because he remains at the crossroads he has been at for a couple of seasons. Europe hems him in, too small to contain him comfortably. America distracts him, but not enough. While Padraig remains happily fascinated with the nuts and bolts of his game we demand:

A. The Major title which he too craves.

B. A move on Tiger Woods in the world rankings.

C. A head-to-head pint-drinking race with Darren Clarke.

The year just gone brought a photo album's worth of decent moments and another Ryder Cup win. Harrington loves the Ryder Cup and while there will have been much joy attached to another win, even he will concede that were his career to end without a Major it would leave a hole in his record. Harrington, with the other two musketeers of the Irish game, Paul McGinley and Clarke, was to the forefront at The K Club of course for this year's instalment of the Ryder Cup, an event which depending on your viewpoint:

A. Was the second-biggest sporting event in the world this year.

B. Was the biggest price-gouging event in the world this year.

C. Was the finest exhibition of beer slurping in the world this year.

Europe won for the third time in succession, but the event was marred by bad weather and the growing realisation that the extraordinary audience figures which had been predicted by gullible Government types were never going to materialise.

In the aftermath we waited in vain for:

A. Refunds.

B. A sign that Tiger Woods really cared.

C. A belt of the crozier for those engaged in the spectacular drinking fest afterwards.

Back in the real world of pro golf, Tiger Woods, who lost his father, Earl, in May, missed the cut at the US Open, but submitted an extraordinary week's work to win the British Open and then went on to win the PGA championship.

In a few months it will be 10 years since Woods won his first Major, that memorable Masters at Augusta. He is 31 just at the turn of the year. His influence on the game beyond his impact on prize purses is due for a major examination. We still await the posse of young pretenders, especially young Black pretenders, his arrival seemed to promise. So far we see:

A. An ageing if not maturing Sergio Garcia.

B. A lot of US college boys in bad jumpers.

C. No practice greens in the ghettos.

Despite his easy affinity with the corporate world and his glassy detachment from the real world, Woods remains, however, the world's greatest sportsperson, easily fending off the claims of Michael Schumacher whose retirement this year at the age of 37, having won the most races, the most pole positions and the most points, certainly robs the stage of a great figure but leaves us still wondering how to separate performances of man, car and engineer in evaluating a career in Formula One.

If Woods has a rival at the moment it is the quiet Swiss Roger Federer, whose style and class brought him the Australian, Wimbledon and US tennis championships this year, just a French Open short of the first grand slam since 1969.

By popular demand this review should end:

A. With a look at soccer.

B. With a joke.

C. Real soon.

So a man walks into one of those new themed pubs in Temple Bar. The theme is the future so he knows already how he's going to feel in the morning. He looks around at all the high-tech trappings, which include this review of the year. As he mounts his stool, which automatically adjusts itself so that he is at the right level with the bar, he notices with a smile that the barman is in fact a robot.

"Very good," he says to himself as the robot puts down the glass he is cleaning, clicks to attention and says, "Sir, what will it be?"

The man thinks back to the rugby season and remembers that drink he meant to try.

"A Heino please," he says.

The robot shuffles off and comes back with a well pulled pint, nice head, right temperature.

The man is impressed.

"What else do you do?" he asks the robot.

"Well," says the robot, "if you tell me your IQ I can tailor my small talk accordingly."

"Okay," says the man putting down his Irish Times. "My IQ is about 164."

The robot comes and goes making small, pithy comments about:

A. The theory of relativity.

B. Nuclear physics and the new League of Ireland promotion system.

C. In a post-modern way, this very column.

The man is so impressed he has to go to the toilet. When he comes back he sits at a different seat and tries again.

"Eh, a pint of Heineken and, by the way, I have an IQ of just under 100."

So another perfect pint comes and the robot proceeds to make general comments about:

A. You're a Star.

B. Heavy-metal music.

C. Sports columns in other papers.

"Unbelievable," says the man to himself. "In the end, robots could replace Joe Duffy."

He decides before he goes to give the robot one last try and again when he finishes his pint he nips out and comes back and sits somewhere else.

"Howya," he says to the robot. "A Heineken please and you may as well know my IQ is 53."

The robot shuffles off, comes back seconds later with the usual pristine pint, which he lays on the table, and says, "Did you really think that you'd find a world-class manager working as the assistant coach at Walsall?"

Of the Steve Staunton and John Delaney two-hander enough has been written already.

Staunton may have been lured into a job for which it seemed he would be ready in maybe a decade's time. Hopefully, he can grow quickly. A struggling Irish team is in nobody's interest and Croke Park, with 20,000 people in it watching the national team, is an unattractive prospect.

The domestic league finished with its usual light notes. Derry were a little breath of fresh air, the FAI Cup final was fun and the system for deciding promotion to the top division was entertaining for those who understood it, a small group that includes the author of The Da Vinci Code.

It was all overshadowed as usual by the big show next door. With regard to Jose Mourinho and Chelsea:

A. The novelty has worn off.

B. Not another year please.

C. The English game gets what it deserves.

The theme of overhyped soccer was carried forward into the World Cup, which was a good, but not great, instalment of the world's biggest sporting event.

An Italian defender winning World Footballer of the Year provides its own commentary on how the vines of pragmatism are choking the romance from the game.

It was an odd competition. Lionel Messi was criminally underused by Argentina, a conservatism which probably cost Jose Pekerman a World Cup. Similarly, Ronaldinho looked an isolated figure for Brazil.

Mexico gave no hint before their exit to Argentina of what they were capable of and by then it was too late. Spain were the usual dark horses/surprise failures. Germany under Klinsmann were something of a joy and so on.

England huffed and puffed and believed too much in:

A. The potency of their own midfield.

B. Sven-Goran Eriksson.

C. The myth that Johnny Foreigner doesn't like it up him.

The final between Italy and France will be remembered almost exclusively for Zinedine Zidane's contribution. Having seen a potential tournament-winning header saved by Buffon he went crazy a little while later and delivered that astonishing headbutt to the chest of Marco Materazzi.

We watched him walk off down the steps past the trophy he almost led his nation to and wondered if the great man hadn't committed the greatest act of criminal self-indulgence in the game's history.

A fitting epitaph for the sporting year?

A. Well, he'd just have got a tick in Croker.

B. His honour was at stake.

C. Et tu Zinedine!

Anyway that's where it ended and that's where we'll leave it too. Happy Christmas.