SPORT REVIEW 2011:2011 wasn't even a marquee year for sport, with no Olympic or World Cup tournament to form its centrepiece, but from the moment the bells chimed midnight, you spent the next 12 months watching high-quality and slickly presented sport, writes KEITH DUGGAN

ON SEPTEMBER 3rd 2011, Rabee’a al Laafi scored the only goal in an African Nations Cup qualifying match between Libya and Mozambique. It was hardly the shot heard around the world: the contest took place in a stadium in Cairo behind closed doors and a heavy veil of security. But in its own way, the goal was just as important as Lionel Messi’s brilliant strike against Manchester United in the Champions League final.

In Cairo, al Laafi and his team-mates wore the National Transitional Council flag of Libya on the crest of their jerseys and even though Libyan football fans had graver matters to contend with than the progression of their team, it was evidence of the new order in their country.

Last May, millions of football fans around the world sat in to watch Barcelona’s entertainers – whose Spanish members now played with the hauteur of World Cup winners – engage Alex Ferguson’s United team in a Champions League final which seemed to suggest that the continental game had moved light years beyond the moneyed English league. Very few people saw the Libyan national’s team first post-Gadafy outing. But already, both goals form just a tiny part of an incredibly crowded and bright montage of global sporting accomplishment.

The year 2011 wasn’t even a marquee year for sport, with no Olympic or World Cup tournament to form its centrepiece. Nonetheless, from the moment the bells chimed midnight, you spent the next 12 months watching high-quality and slickly presented sport.

In one way, these are times of unparalleled riches for sports fans, with all sports fighting for your attention and your money, whether through season tickets at White Hart Lane or Croke Park or a subscription to satellite sports so you can satisfy your inexplicable loyalty to the Toronto Maple Leafs’ ice hockey team or Burnley FC or cycling or whatever you fancy.

In the sporting world, the Roman calendar is shunted aside and time is measured in festivals and tournaments: the Six Nations rolls into Cheltenham, the dreamy murmurings of Augusta are a sure sign that Easter has arrived, the primal roar of the All-Ireland championship marks the onset of summer and drizzle lit by Thomond Park floodlights has become all but the unofficial emblem of the rugby’s Heineken Cup.

Sport has become a 24/7 distraction, which makes it all the more difficult for a genuinely wonderful, breathtaking ‘moment’ to take in enough oxygen to rise – and remain – above the great field of merely excellent sporting accomplishment.

It may surprise you, for instance, to note that Novak Djokovic ran away with three of the four tennis Majors this year. Or that Wladimir Klitschko’s decisive sacking of David Haye gave him his fifth heavyweight belt and places him in elite company when it comes to the longest reigning heavyweight champions, right between James Jefferies and Muhammad Ali.

Rory McIlroy’s riveting disintegration during the final round of the US Masters is easily recalled by all Irish sports fans. But how quickly does the name of this year’s champion come to mind? Golf fans may instantly recall Charl Schwartzel easing into the green jacket but for most casual followers, the South African’s triumph is probably a more fuzzy memory.

Even McIlroy’s imperious recovery and seemingly effortless US Open win at Congressional evokes a warm, pleasant feeling rather than the sense of an era-defining moment, like Nicklaus and Watson at Turnberry in ’77.

It was easier in the old days, when sports on television was still largely a treat and therefore the shimmering moments – McEnroe punking the establishment at Wimbledon or the Barbarians making-it-up-for-fun against the All-Blacks in 1973 or Nadia Comaneci’s Perfect 10 or, more locally, Ray Houghton’s goal against England in 1988.

It is difficult for sporting moments to transcend the tournament to which they belong because there are so many other eye-catching sequences of play crying out for attention. Did one billion people really watch India play Pakistan in the semi-final of the cricket World Cup this year? That event, framed by the lingering hostility caused by the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was another example of politics using sport as a shield.

Leading figures from both countries were in attendance at the game and the stars were subjected to absurd level of scrutiny, with police officials taking meals with the teams to ensure no debilitating potion was slipped into the food.

The scale of interest in that match shrinks all other major sporting events, with the 111 million who tuned in last January to watch the Green Bay Packers defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Superbowl XLV little more than a family barbecue in comparison.

And the popular interest of the cricket World Cup certainly relatives the appeal of rugby, the other post-colonial sport attempting to stake its claim as a world sport.

Still, it was a big year for rugby. Leinster’s nerveless second-half comeback against Northampton in the European Cup final illustrated yet again that this is a magical age for Irish rugby. That exhilarating day, along with a heartening win over England in Dublin and the knowledge that Brian O’Driscoll and company were facing into their final World Cup tournament sent the Irish to New Zealand with high hopes.

And Ireland’s 15-6 win against Australia in the group stages led to hushed but confident talk of possible progression to the World Cup final. That fantasy lasted all of a week.

Then Ireland turned up cloudy-headed and leaden-footed for their quarter-final against Wales who were, true to their tradition, flawless in the anthem and cocky on the field of play. That was that. That Irish quarter-final defeat mirrored the competition itself: it was anti-climactic.

The tournament was too long and burdened with pointless mismatches and lacked a spellbinding classic game to serve as its beacon. The disappearance of Dan Carter, New Zealand’s talisman, from the tournament through injury, was all too apt. Instead of the All-Blacks hero, it fell to Stephen Donald, New Zealand’s fourth-choice and much maligned reserve outhalf to take a fretful final against France by the scruff of the neck.

Donald’s first few minutes on the field were spent dealing with the humiliating suspicion that his team-mates were, consciously or otherwise, not passing him the ball. But he still stepped up and took the ball from a misfiring Piri Weepu and landed the penalty that won the Webb Ellis trophy for the host nation. But relief rather than joy was the abiding emotion after that tournament.

Back home, rugby pressed into its winter season. Just a few weeks ago, Ronan O’Gara made his 100th appearance for Munster, a staggering feat of endurance and consistency when one compares it with the story of Ian McKinley, the promising young Leinster outhalf who had to retire this year at age 21 because of an eye injury.

McKinley had shown terrific promise as an underage star and resolve to recover from his injury but his eyesight deteriorated anyhow and his career became a reflection on what might had been.

His dignified exit demonstrated that in any sport, players are dependent on the breaks of the game: beneath the practice, the repetition, the fitness, the psychologists and everything else, the old fingers-crossed superstition still remains.

The luckiest – and sometimes even the best – sports stars got even richer over the year. Seven of the top 10 female athletes in the world play tennis. Carlos Tevez spent the early part of the winter sulking his way through a €300,000 per week contract with Manchester City. Tiger Woods may have suffered a cataclysmic fall from sporting and personal grace but he still collected €57 million between May 2010 and May 2011. David Beckham earned €30.5 million between pay and endorsements, despite entering the twilight of his football career.

Those fabulous sums of money serve to exaggerate the distance between the sporting gods and those who follow their every move. And maybe the chosen ones are becoming aware of the gap. Maybe they are beginning to feel isolated! For the advent of social media has led to the phenomenon of the stars trying to communicate to their people directly. And so, through Twitter, you can have Wayne Rooney telling you (and two million others): 'Just listening to AC/DC in my room getting ready for the game'. It's a harmless insight but you would never learn from a MOTDinterview that Croxteth's favourite son likes to get the blood racing with For Those About To Rock.

At the other end of the spectrum are the wonderfully deadpan observations of Irish tennis professional Conor Niland, who this year became the first Irishman to reach Wimbledon since Seán Sorensen in 1980 and who came tantalisingly close to winning a first-round match which would have set him up for a dream encounter with Roger Federer.

Niland never loses sight of his place on the food chain of world sport and his clipped observations double as snapshots of life for the vast majority of merely excellent athletes who operate, for the most part, on the very edge of the bright lights that seduce us all. “Won today in Salzburg,” Niland posted not so long ago. “Two days off till next match. Enough time to write a symphony but will probably just manage a trip to Mozart’s old house.”

Wise decision. After all, there are so many symphonies written in modern sports, who is going to have time to listen to another?