Eamonn Sweeney: 'Changing the course of history - eight sporting moments that defined a decade'

On the other hand, 10 years have wrought massive changes in the sporting landscape. This time a decade ago, Dublin seemed like Gaelic football's ultimate losers, trouncings by Tyrone in 2008 and Kerry in 2009 having changed them from hard luck story to laughing stock.

The circumstantial evidence might have been piling up and the chorus of begrudgers growing louder, but as far as mainstream opinion was concerned Lance Armstrong's six Tour de France victories remained one of the age's great athletic achievements. 'He's never failed a drug test,' seemed the definitive rejoinder to the doubters.

Manchester United entered the new decade with three Premier League titles on the trot and it seemed likely that even when Alex Ferguson did step down the winning machine would keep rumbling on.

Tiger Woods would surely overcome the lurid stories about his personal life which had surfaced a couple of months before the end of the decade and overhaul Jack Nicklaus's total of 18 Majors sometime over the next 10 years. And after a dream debut season which yielded a first Grand Slam in 61 years, Declan Kidney seemed set to go from strength to strength as head coach of the Irish rugby team.

Things didn't work out that way.

Not one person would have predicted that the most-hyped Irish sporting event of the decade would involve a young man then taking his first steps in a sport no-one had heard of. Or that the former assistant coach of a French team who signed a contract to manage Leinster three days before the beginning of 2010 would become the most successful Irish international coach in history.

Who could have foreseen that the record number of Irish winners at one Cheltenham Festival would almost double or that in 2019 there would be 23,000 more spectators at the All-Ireland ladies' football final than at the men's semi-final between Tyrone and Kerry?

So here are eight moments when the course of sporting history changed and headed off in a different direction from that which had been confidently predicted. These were the turning points of the 2010s.

1. Declan O'Sullivan Gives It Away

September 18, 2011, Croke Park

Six minutes from the end of the 2011 All-Ireland football final Dublin were still losers. Fancied beforehand to finally end the metropolitan wait for honours, it looked as though they had once more been undone by Kerry. For all the talk about the great rivalry between the counties it was a wholly one-sided one with the Dubs not having beaten the Kingdom since 1977.

Now Kerry were four points clear and expertly holding possession in the middle of the field. The ball was in the hands of Declan O'Sullivan, one of the most intelligent players in the game. And then, inexplicably, O'Sullivan broke the habit of a footballing lifetime (he may in fairness have been concussed by a tackle earlier in the game) and fisted the ball straight to his Dublin namesake Cian.

The second O'Sullivan was fouled, but immediately struck a perfect pass to Alan Brogan who careered forward as a wrong-footed Kerry tried to move back into position. Brogan found Kevin McManamon who sidestepped a challenge and put the ball in the net.

Twelve seconds had elapsed between the intercept and that goal but they changed everything. The momentum swung in Dublin's direction, not just in that game, as they won by a point to end a 16-year wait for Sam Maguire, but for the rest of the decade.

Jim Gavin would take over from Pat Gilroy and lead Dublin to five in a row with new stars supplanting Brogan and McManamon. But it was the 2011 final which crucially broke the losing pattern. Since then, Dublin have beaten Kerry in two more All-Ireland finals and two semis. It all began with the pass that went astray.

2. Jamie Heaslip Is Unwell

March 18, 2017, Aviva Stadium

Joe Schmidt had made an immediate impact as Irish coach with Six Nations wins in 2014 and 2015 but as the team faced England in the final Six Nations match of 2017, things seemed to be unravelling. Defeats by Scotland and Wales meant Ireland were in danger of finishing with just two wins out of five.

Facing them was an England team which had already clinched a second title in a row and scored 61 points against Scotland in the previous game. To make matters worse, Jamie Heaslip pulled out just before kick-off.

Sorry, did I say to make matters worse? Because Heaslip was replaced by Peter O'Mahony, who proceeded to give one of the finest individual displays ever witnessed from an Irish forward and inspire Ireland to a 13-9 win. It proved to be the springboard for the greatest couple of years in Irish rugby history as the team went on to win the Grand Slam and a series in Australia, as well as beating the All Blacks with O'Mahony again man of the match.

Before the game against England, O'Mahony had been regarded as unlikely to make the Lions touring party to New Zealand. He ended up captaining the team in the first Test. And Heaslip? He never played for Ireland again. Now that's what I call a turning point.

3. Willie Mullins Sends Michael O'Leary a Bill

September 28, 2016, Closutton/Gigginstown

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Michael O'Leary and Willie Mullins. Photo: Sportsfile

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It had been several years since Willie Mullins had raised training fees, but when Ireland's National Hunt king informed owners of what he was about to do, one of them wasn't happy at all. In fact, Michael O'Leary was so unhappy he withdrew his 60 horses from Mullins' yard, sending many of the best of them to up-and-coming trainer Gordon Elliott.

That decision sparked a fantastic contest for the trainer's title over the next two years between Mullins and Elliott. Twice the younger man went to the season finale at Punchestown holding a big lead and twice Mullins overhauled him. Most significantly, the arms race between the two, who saddled horses in previously unseen numbers, resulted in English trainers suffering collateral damage. At the start of the decade the record number of Irish winners at Cheltenham was 10, set in 2006. In 2017 there were 17, a year later 19, the majority of them from the Mullins and Elliott stables.

In the end something had to give and that something was O'Leary's commitment to racing. He announced a phased withdrawal from the sport early this year. Mullins had won but what a battle had been sparked by one financial decision on his part.

4. Obscure Dub Loses Low-Key Bout In Unknown Sport

November 27, 2010, Cork

The loss of a fight in just 38 seconds on a winter's night in Cork by an unemployed plumber hardly seemed the harbinger of great things. Yet, according to his striking coach Owen Roddy, this was the moment when everything changed for Conor McGregor. "After that he became a different animal. He lived in the gym. The Conor we know now, that's where he came from."

McGregor's rise was the most unforeseen sports story of the decade. Before his first UFC fight against Marcus Brimage in April 2013 he was still signing on the dole and most Irish people had never heard of Mixed Martial Arts.

But when McGregor won the world featherweight title by knocking out Jose Aldo in December 2015 probably no Irish sportsman was so admired by those under 30. And by the time he faced Floyd Mayweather in August 2017 he might have been the most famous man in the country.

His loss in that Las Vegas farrago seemed another turning point. The story has gone sour since then, the antics which seemed so daring started to look nasty as public and private personas became entangled.

This was a kind of rock and roll story and they don't always end well. Celebrity, wrote John Updike, is a mask which eats into the face. Yet in his melding of the words of celebrity, showbiz and sport McGregor may well have been the emblematic figure of the decade.

5. Sergio Ramos Heads Just Wide

April 20, 2013, Madrid

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Sergio Ramos. Photo: AFP via Getty Images

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No manager has ever stood higher in the public estimation than Jose Mourinho did in May 2012. Real Madrid's La Liga victory with a record number of points and goals scored seemed to show that he'd broken Barcelona's dominance as he had Manchester United's in the Premier League when managing Chelsea. Champions League wins with unfancied Porto and Inter Milan teams seemed to show that here was a man who could do anything.

But things got rocky the following season. Barcelona regained the title with something to spare, Mourinho became increasingly disgruntled with Spanish football and in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final, Borussia Dortmund scored a shock 4-1 win over Real.

The second leg at the Bernabeu seemed to be drifting to an uneventful close when it remained scoreless with ten minutes left. Then Karim Benzema scored in the 83rd minute and Sergio Ramos made it 2-0 with two minutes of normal time.

Real needed just one more goal for a famous victory and the sideline board showed five minutes of injury-time. In the third of those minutes Mesut Ozil swung in a corner and Ramos rose above the defence to meet it. Had his header ended up in the net, Mourinho's reputation as a miracle worker would have been restored and Real would have been favoured to win the Champions League final against Bayern Munich. It dropped wide.

Afterwards a shattered Mourinho ranted, "I know in England I am loved by the fans . . . in Spain the situation is a bit different because some people hate me." He left Real soon after but neither a return to Chelsea nor a dream move to Manchester United worked out as Mourinho cut an increasingly embittered and diminished figure.

A year later, with Real Madrid 1-0 down in Champions League final injury-time to Atletico Madrid, Ramos got his head to another corner. This time it went in, they won in extra-time and added the next two Champions Leagues.

6 Shane Lowry Has A Good Friday

July 27, 2018, Oakville, Ontario

It looked for a while like Shane Lowry would be remembered for another kind of turning point. Four shots clear going into the final round of the 2016 US Open, he seemed about to complete his progress into the elite ranks of world golf. Instead he shot 76 and lost by three shots to Dustin Johnson.

That seemed to have a catastrophic effect on the Offaly man who over the next two years tumbled from 19th in the world rankings to the 92nd he occupied after missing the cut at the British Open. After that failure at Carnoustie, Lowry sat in the car park and cried. "Golf wasn't my friend at the time. It had become something that had become very stressful and it was weighing on me and I didn't like doing it," he recalled.

Lowry's next tournament was the Canadian Open where an opening round of 70 put him in danger of missing the cut again (it turned out to be 140). But in the second he hit a 67 which moved him up 46 places. Two more sub-70 rounds earned him joint 12th and a move up to 89th in the rankings.

It might not have seemed much at the time, but Lowry was back on an upward path. He never saw the 90s again By the time he played the British Open the following year he was up to 41st.

And when he went into the last round at Portrush with a four-shot lead, this time he didn't blow it. He finished the year back in the world top 20 and the decade as perhaps the country's most beloved sportsman.

7. Eugenie Bouchard Hits Her Head

September 5, 2015, Flushing Meadows, New York

After winning a mixed doubles match in the US Open, the number 25 seed in the singles went back to the dressing room for an ice bath. As she looked for a light switch in the dark, Eugenie Bouchard slipped on a pool of water and hit her head off the floor, forcing her to pull out of a fourth round match against Italy's Roberta Vinci.

This unforeseen bit of extra rest surely stood to Vinci as she outlasted France's Kristina Mladenovic in a marathon quarter-final where her opponent was badly hampered by cramp. That win put Vinci into a semi-final against Serena Williams who was just two matches away from becoming the fourth woman in history to win all four Grand Slam events in one year.

The unseeded Vinci had played 43 Grand Slam tournaments without ever getting beyond the quarter-finals and had already booked her flight back home in anticipation of defeat. Yet she beat Williams 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 in what was by some distance the biggest sporting upset of the decade.

Williams never seemed quite so invincible after that. In the four years before meeting Vinci she'd won eight Grand Slam titles and seemed certain to eclipse Margaret Court's record of 24. In the four years since she's won just two and remains one short of Court's total. Where Vinci led others have followed with six defeats for Williams in finals, all of which she entered as favourite.

She must wish someone had left the light on for Eugenie Bouchard.

8. The IABA Change Their Secretarial Arrangements

January 2015, Dublin

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Billy Walsh. Photo: Sportsfile

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After the 2012 Olympics Irish Amateur Boxing's High Performance Unit was regarded as the paragon of sporting excellence in this country. The team had delivered a gold, a silver and two bronzes at the London Olympics to go with the silver and two bronzes four years earlier in Beijing. Their coach Billy Walsh had become a national figure.

But Billy Walsh was not a happy man. Though he had been the de facto head of the High Performance Unit since 2008, the IABA would not pay him the salary commensurate with the job, preferring to regard him as a mere team coach. He felt disrespected and when, in January 2015, his administrative secretary was moved to another building without a word of notice to Walsh, that feeling grew even stronger.

If it was not the actual straw that broke the camel's back, it was one of them. The IABA seemed unconcerned about keeping Walsh when he was offered the job as coach of the US team and before the end of the year he was gone. At the following year's Olympics Ireland's team of highly regarded medal prospects, Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan and Paddy Barnes among them, all made early exits.

The US, who'd only won five fights at the 2012 games, won three medals in Rio and Walsh was named world coach of the year. At this year's world championships, Ireland finished without a medal for the first time in 12 years. No-one talks about the excellence of our amateur boxing system anymore.