Enda McEvoy: In this bleakest, most frustrating of winters everything is possible

MOMENTS TO SAVOUR: St Thomas’ defender Fintan Burke and his team-mates celebrate with the cup after their victory over Clarinbridge in last month’s Galway SHC final at Pearse Stadium. The anticipation of sporting moments to come will keep us enthralled throughout 2022.  Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

Woke up this morning, got meself a calendar. It goes something like this.

The National Football League from January 29 and the hurling equivalent from a week later. The coursing in Clonmel, February 4-7. The Six Nations, February 5 — starting with Ireland v Wales at 2.15pm — to March 19. Cheltenham, March 15-18. Wimbledon, June 27-July 10. All-Ireland hurling and football deciders July 17 and 24 respectively. World Cup finals, November 21-December 18.

It reads much as you’d expect, give or take the high-summer Croke Park showpieces and the pre-Christmas World Cup final. After all, for as long as people like us can remember, one of sport’s myriad virtues is the manner in which it serves as a timepiece, ticking off the passing of the weeks and months and seasons.

No apologies for that elaborate second paragraph with the dates, though. Just to be sure to be sure, all the more so as in a recent university study in England no less than 80% of the participants claimed that their memory had deteriorated since the start of the pandemic, with more than half forgetting when particular events had occurred.

Granted, that was them and this is, well, us. Dare one venture that not too many of the participants in the study were sports fans? Folk like you and me know when the Six Nations takes place, and Cheltenham and Wimbledon and the rest of it. And if it’s the All-Ireland finals it must be September… er, August… no, make that December… hang on, we’re back to July now.

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No matter. You get the drift.

What casket of delights awaits in 2022 is a question to be answered in the general rather than in the personal because nobody ever gets everything they want from the sporting year. Nobody ever gets even the half of it.

So no, your team won’t win the Premier League unless you support Manchester City, although if you’re a Merseyside red there may well be the consolation of Champions League glory.

And no, your county won’t win the All-Ireland unless you’re from Limerick or from Kerry/Dublin/Tyrone. Your county definitely won’t win the All-Ireland if you’re from Mayo, but we’ve been down this particular road before and hey, journey versus destination and all of that.

Nor will any Cork reader roar triumphantly down the card, 1 and 6 reverse forecast, some night in Curraheen Park. But he or she might, say, back the Grand National winner in April and Rachael — like Cher, she doesn’t require a surname — might be on board again.

In this bleakest, most frustrating of midwinters everything is possible. It always is in the first week of January, as if we were in that Los Angeles hostelry with Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye.

“I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation.”

The anticipation. That’s it. The mot juste. Always has been, always will be. The anticipation.

There’s the anticipation of the personal and the anticipation of the universal. In the former it may be something as simple as hoping that your club surprises everyone by mounting an unlikely challenge for the county championship, or looking forward to studying whether that promising minor you noticed a couple of years ago has trained on and is set for bigger things (and the frisson of giving yourself a small but well merited pat on the back if he is, of course), or the eternal dream of clicking with a long-odds each-way Lucky 15 on the opening day at Cheltenham.

The anticipation of the universal? It is limitless.

There’s the anticipation of a Grand Slam for Ireland, slightly — albeit only slightly — likelier following last November’s victory against New Zealand. The fact that 2016’s breakthrough in Chicago is an increasingly distant memory in view of the two subsequent defeats of the men in black is devoutly to be welcomed. Far from allowing it to be a one-off, and singing tiresome come-all-yez about it for the next 50 years, Ireland have rendered Chicago the beginning of something. Beating New Zealand has become commonplace. Andy Farrell is looking forwards, not back.

There’s the anticipation of a hurling season humming with not one, not two but three stand-out narratives. The distinct prospect of Limerick making it three in a row and four out of five; the fortunes of Henry Shefflin’s Galway, as they will inevitably and unavoidably become known; and the possibility that we are looking at Brian Cody’s Championship swansong, the latter because a poor season will necessitate the Kilkenny County Board assuming the responsibility for appointing a manager for 2023 as opposed to doing the usual thing and allowing Cody to look into his own heart, a la Dev, and make the decision for them.

The anticipation of what the Cork camogie team will get up to now that Davy Fitz is there, an event guaranteed to add to the gaiety of the nation.

The anticipation of what will unfold over the next four weeks at Newcastle United, simultaneously the richest club in the world and one of the poorest in the Premier League. Schrodinger’s Geordies, as it were.

Yet nothing is lost yet. What with Norwich plumbing new depths of ineptitude by the week and Watford’s 4-1 victory against Solskjaer’s Manchester United saying even more than we suspected at the time about the losers than it did about the winners, the old one about the two gazelles being chased by the leopard springs afresh to mind.

First Gazelle: “Can you outrun a leopard?”

Second Gazelle: “No. But I don’t have to outrun the leopard. I only have to outrun you.”

The anticipation, when eventually one gets around to contemplating it, of what awaits in Qatar come the end of the year. Look, it’s hard to get excited right now and so it should be.

Grounds for indifference are ample and have been comprehensively ventilated. But then the first referee will blow the first whistle and the tournament will be underway and most people will set aside most of their qualms for the following four weeks. It is human nature.

A distance of 10 months is too great for a long-range forecast. Suffice it to say, however, that with their preposterous depth at right-back and wealth of midfield creators and tricky wide men, England are better stocked for the business end of the competition than they have been in living memory.

Whether their manager can loosen his own corset stays and abandon his fidelity to playing the percentages will be the real issue.

(You really do want a long-range forecast? Spain. May lack too much of a cutting edge in both boxes — Sergio Ramoses don’t grow on orange trees — but they’re young and play engaging football and will be fun to watch.)

The anticipation and the lovely shining glasses.

Look to the future now, it’s only just begun.