LOCKERROOM:Fianna Fáil's crimes against sport probably won't be remembered by the populace as clearly as their crimes against our nationhood – and that's sickening

WOKE UP yesterday in one of those wishful moods. Wished that as I’d slept we had fast-forwarded to 2012. Not that life will be any better in 2012. Just that the process of getting there is going to be so painful if it unfolds gradually. Let’s just get it over with.

Face it. Fianna Fáil, for all manner of reasons, should have the decency to dissolve and withdraw from what is left of the farce of Irish political life now. They won’t, and as such their crimes against sport probably won’t be remembered by the populace as clearly as their crimes against our nationhood – and that’s sickening.

We’ll miss things like health and education and a having a standard of living, but we’ll miss sport just as much and for longer.

Fianna Fáil have always played a clever game in claiming the credit for all sports success and not being around for any of the failures. We won’t miss their shiny suits and big red faces waving down at us from upstairs on the open-top buses.

Hmmm. It will hurt. They have warned us. Health, education and social welfare about to go into the big shredder. After that it is difficult to imagine what is going to happen to sports funding. The phrase itself may fall into disuse.

It’s enough to make you regret that Fianna Fáil didn’t get to build the monument to its arrogance which was to be the Bertie Bowl. In parts of Dublin it is possible to see the cathedrals of Croke Park and Lansdowne Road on one glance. Imagine the horror on the faces of our new owners if there were a third massive stadium on the skyline. No other infrastructural legacy of the Celtic Delusion years. Just a Bermuda triangle with three massive stadiums as its points and three-quarters of a billion sucked into the blackness.

So 2012. Let’s get there. Let’s assume members of Enda Kenny’s Vichy government are barred from attending big games in any code should there ever again be big games in any code. With the tumbleweed blowing through Lansdowne Road and the wind echoing in Croke Park, we sometimes wonder.

2012. Premium level rooms are being used as classrooms and dressingrooms have been turned into AEs

At the last game to be played in Croke Park, the familiar face of Brian Cowen leans forward with a confidence which he seemed so desperately to lack while in Government.

“Official programmes,” he says. “Official programmes.”

You can’t hate forever, so those with the means (€150 in 2012 money) find a German to approve and co-sign their personal cheques and buy programmes from the old goofball. Like old times with Cowen. His programme is sketchy and vague and basically denies there is a game on at all.

(Contrast that bluster with the straightforwardness of Brian Lenihan in his new job. “Do you want fries with that?” he asks frankly again and again. “Having it here or taking it away?” Sure, it might have taken family connections to get him the job, but he is good at it.)

2012. We had thought the grim performance of our two-man team at the London Olympics might be a low point, but things continue to slide. As if the ignominy of having 50 per cent of our total Olympic team fail drug tests wasn’t enough, the EU has repossessed Giovanni Trapattoni in harrowing scenes redolent of a “tug of love” court case. Who will ever forget the tear-stained, desolate face of young John Delaney as they took his Uncle Giovanni away to a better place (Kabul has been mentioned as such a place)?

“But I bought beer for the fans,” wept Delaney over and over, until the sight of Giovanni’s affordable replacement tipped him over the edge of reason. Steve Staunton’s second coming as Irish national manager has yet to be consummated with a game but nevertheless has, as expected, subtracted much from the national gaiety. Meanwhile, the tumbleweed blows through Lansdowne Road behind him and the braziers of the homeless (well, Shamrock Rovers, again) illuminate the once distinctive stands.

Ah 2012. There shall be no prawn sandwich brigade and no ham sandwich warriors. Big-time sport shall be a luxury beyond our means. P Harrington, G Mac and the young curly fella shall be representing the Cayman Islands. People will make little nostalgic pilgrimages to see the road we built just to host the Ryder Cup. We shall gawp in wonder just as people gawp at the pyramids and try to imagine the sheer difference between that civilisation and our own.

Sport as we know it shall be a throw back to the 18th century. Organised on a parish-by- parish basis and consisting of such simple pleasures as toe-pegging, tossing the stone, running and leppin’. Gaelic football shall be stripped of its scientific input and become again a rough, rudimentary game like caid or Ulster football in the 1980s.

Brian O’Driscoll will be sold on eBay and we will lose touch with him entirely as rugby is driven underground by craven bigots with columns in newspapers. Soccer will survive but only in League of Ireland form, like an opera which performs only in mime.

Those legions of development officers and training personnel employed once by sports bodies shall wander the land like tracksuited Spartans, pillaging towns and villages in the search for nutritional balance and pre-hydration.

That shall be the legacy. A wasteland made of the sports we love. The opium of a screwed-up people confiscated. No escape. No dream world.

And we will wait for a star to flash across the sky regardless of the night. A Sonia. A John Treacy. A Liam Brady. A Barry McGuigan. A JBM. Somebody who can lift us out of the trough we are all being submerged in and make us want to go on.

2012? 2013? 2014? The hardest thing is the waiting. In the years in between we will be struggling just to survive. We'll be singing Ode to Joyand facing the EU flag at All-Irelands and then we'll wake up one day and realise our sport has been decimated by the national handlers.

But hey, we can’t all volunteer to be doctors or teachers or social scientists, but we can get off our asses and get down to our local GAA club, or rugby club or soccer club or whatever, and do a bit to make sure it survives and to make sure we pass on at least this gift to the generations upon which we will be guiltily offloading our overdraft.

Let’s not be the suckers here.