Welcome to the year of the Trap

AN IRISH website listed its most popular sports blogs of the year the other day and, lo and behold, the top three places were occupied by dispatches from the World Cup in South Africa.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that would be the World Cup in which Irish involvement was conspicuously absent, owing to a certain incident of hand to ball by a pesky Frenchman coupled with a frankly chronic failure of imagination on the part of the blazers which meant that poor Paddy couldn’t even go to the party as a ‘plus-one’.

Aye, and let’s not spoil the fantasy by mentioning all those points dropped in qualifying or the host of chances squandered in the Stade de France.