Now please understand, this isn't a 'sneer at the Brits' thing. Had Irish sport just been through the kind of year British sport has . . . and rugby and horse racing aside, there's not a lot to be getting snotty about anyway . . . this side of me would locate just as much glee in sitting down and watching Michael Lyster and friends try to tiptoe through it all.

It's not schadenfreude either and actually I don't know if even the Germans would have a word for it (although I'm more than open to enlightenment on that score). This isn't taking pleasure in the trials of others. Instead, it's taking pleasure in the groping attempts of others to brush those trials under a carpet and present to the world their happy face. Follow the Irish soccer team around for any length of time and it almost becomes a default setting.

I've just checked the BBC website for the TV listing for tonight's show and here's what it says. Live from the NEC in Birmingham, Sue Barker, Gary Lineker and Adrian Chiles present a celebration of the best moments from a memorable year of sport. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh, would you not?

So it's been a bare old year for our friends across the water, we know that.

The upshot is that when it comes down to picking someone out and handing them the old silver camera trophy at the end of the night, the pool goes about as deep as a gnat's knee. This isn't the first time it's come to pass of course, as Greg Rusedski, the proud winner of the 1997 award, will gladly tell you.

The BBC always misses a trick when this happens. By faithfully handing the trophy out year after year to the least undeserving candidate, they undermine what is actually a great concept with a fine and storied history. Some people see it as a cheap piece of theatre, a soft-focus backslap that seeks to lionise the BBC at least as much as it does the recipient. And that's only true because of the Rusedskis and Beckhams and Owens they award it to when there's nobody else around.

It's going to be the same this year.

Darren Clarke will almost certainly win an award he doesn't want for precisely the reason he doesn't want it. He'll win it not for being a sportsman but for being a man. It isn't sport, it's human interest. Far from rewarding Clarke, it is actually cheapening the achievements of one of the best golfers ever to come out of these islands just so a television show can have a sentimental ending on a Sunday night.

Yes, it's true that sport is about character and heart and overcoming monumental difficulties to perform.

And I was standing at the side of the first green that Friday morning at the K Club when Clarke rolled in that incredible birdie and I marvelled at the strength and ability of the man to do such a thing in such circumstances. I marvelled then and I marvel now. But this is the wrong award for the wrong reason.

That Darren Campbell is a name that never made any bookmaker's list won't surprise anyone. But there's a real argument for saying that no British sportsperson made a bigger contribution to sport this year than the now-retired sprinter. When he refused to join his teammate Dwain Chambers in their lap of honour after Britain won the 4x100m relay gold at the European Championship in Gothenburg, he was taking a stand against the drug cheats that have ruined his sport. He felt Chambers . . . who had just returned from a two-year drugs ban . . . hadn't done enough to expose the people who had led him into the world of steroids and wanted the wider world to know that athletics is still sick inside.

What Campbell did was untidy and uncomfortable and was tinged by the knowledge that he's never distanced himself from his coach Linford Christie despite Christie being every bit the drug cheat Chambers is. But for all that, it was a brave and unexpected move, a blow struck for a sport that's dropping off the radar because of too many people like Dwain Chambers and not enough like Darren Campbell.

In a year of few heroes, here was at least one.