Sports pictures of the year: And these are the ones that didn’t make it...

One of the year’s most satisfying assignments doesn’t even necessitate a pair of street shoes much less a crack-of-dawn flight or a winter bobble hat.

Sat, 21 Dec, 2019 - 06:25

Tony Leen

One of the year’s most satisfying assignments doesn’t even necessitate a pair of street shoes much less a crack-of-dawn flight or a winter bobble hat.

Choosing the best sports pictures of the year is a delight. Nominating the ones to miss out less so.

Our regard for the creativity of the super snappers is boundless — from a facility to excavate the nook or cranny that delivers the optimum angle to the ability to stay wonderfully oblivious to the elements that infiltrate every crevice on the dog afternoons and evenings.

It’s been said here more than once — Ireland is steeped to have a pair of the world’s greatest sports photo agencies besting each other, week on week.

Inpho and Sportsfile are a match and more for the great image makers of the world, believe me. They are the Hasselblads of the genre.

On Monday, we publish a special 32-page magazine dedicated to the most striking, most innovative sports photography of 2019.

Some crop up annually — skiing in Innsbruck, the Super Bowl, the Masters, the Premier League, and the GAA fields and stadia of the four provinces.

Sports picture of the year? Well you could make a strong case for the image that wraps around Monday’s magazine, or the artistry of the figure skaters from Lake Placid.

Or for pure timing, you have to smile at the Westport women’s rugby team in the wake of their Connacht Senior Cup win.

On these pages, we publish a selection of the pictures that got squeezed out, in some cases purely on the basis of geometry and scale.

In doing so, we applaud and apologise at once — and express our gratitude to those inventive eyes and minds for dressing up our inadequacies and pages.