In the AFL, the year was certainly flat and underwhelming, due to the twin debacles of fan-hostile fixturing and the interminable ASADA-Essendon saga, which continued to suck oxygen from the game.

Cricket had triumphs in the Ashes and against South Africa, but the Australian Test team's regaining of No.1 status proved both ephemeral and false, as Pakistan embarrassed our first eleven in the desert. The Phillip Hughes tragedy then rendered results meaningless.

Golf didn't rise to Himalayan heights, either. Adam Scott was steady, but understandably couldn't replicate his stellar 2013, when he donned the Augustan green jacket. He made No.1 for a brief moment, mind you, on the back of his Masters. Jason Day, a threat in the majors, was hurt for much of the golfing year's back nine.

Tennis produced a shaft of bright sunlight when Nick Kyrgios upset Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon and hinted that we might have a real player, without parental baggage. But the Socceroos, despite Tim Cahill's surgical strikes, were barely competitive in the World Cup. Rugby's Wallabies were mired in internecine strife.

Sally Pearson kept clearing hurdles - the foremost being a spat with the head coach of the athletics team during the Commonwealth Games. Sally saw off the hapless coach, and the field. But the Comm Games isn't an Olympics or World Championship, any more than Glasgow is London.

Racing didn't have a Black Caviar or another bona fide champion to rally behind, while a pair of horses, including the Japanese winner of the Caulfield Cup, died after running in the Melbourne Cup. Daniel Ricciardo, who saluted in three Formula One races, was probably our standout sportsman or woman on the international stage, though surfers will mount a case for serial champ Stephanie Gilmore.

In real estate, they say it's position, position, position that counts. The sporting equivalent is fixture, fixture, fixture. If we are playing a cricket World Cup in Australia, with finals at the MCG, followed by an appetising Ashes tour, then cricket's spirits should soar.

It follows that if 2014 wasn't flash, a better year beckons.

Let's kick off with the local obsession. Having lost fans due to a fixturing experiment in which the patient lost patience, the AFL has devised a fixture which includes some radical concepts, such as playing games on Saturday afternoons, and not scheduling the tri-nation blockbusters between Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon on Sunday evenings.

Overall, there's been a recognition that in the balance between television and the live spectator, the balance had tilted too far towards the remote viewer. The NRL has had a similar epiphany, though rugby league is built for the TV zombie.

Hawthorn's premiership and Port's rise were positives, since these teams play a positive, attacking style. By the latter stages of 2014, hitherto dour Fremantle had taken off any shackles and was regularly kicking 100 points.

Since even the worst teams can congest and deploy defensive mechanisms, it is the ability to use the ball and then score that should increasingly separate sides. "Who dares scores" might be a leitmotif for 2015 footy.

The competition, too, is hurtling towards equality on the field, as the impact of expansion recedes. Another reason for optimism is the prospect that the Essendon players v ASADA legal cage match will have a resolution relatively soon, though similar hopes were voiced this time last year.

Cricket, meanwhile, is offering a two-course meal - World Cup here, then Ashes in the old dart - that is hard to pass up. It doesn't necessarily matter how the Aussies fare, so long as they're competitive and the cricket entertains.  Michael Clarke's body is a concern, and this column blithely guesses that the hamstrung skipper will miss the World Cup and return for the Windies tour to tune up for the Ashes.

The World Cup can transcend our parochialism, too - India v Pakistan at the enlarged Adelaide Oval sold out in 12 minutes.

The round ball game cannot top a World Cup in which Australia participates, but to see the imminent Asian Cup contested in Australia will be a welcome novelty. To have the Socceroos competing in their rightful weight division also intensifies the summer competition between cricket and the global game. Last year, cricket was ascendant due to Channel Ten's Big Bash League. Can soccer regain ground this summer?

The Wallabies will contest rugby's World Cup in England during September-October, and and no matter how they go, the event will elevate interest in a code  - and national team - that have been left behind.

On Friday, I was a guest at what was euphemistically described as "a sportsman's lunch" - an occasion where middle-aged blokes flee the office and their families to spend a few hours eating, drinking and talking sport, peppered with speeches. One of the formalities is a time capsule in which predictions are made for the year - AFL premiers, Brownlow and spoon, golf major winner, most runs by a test player (any country), teams that will move furthest up or down the AFL ladder and a specific prognostication about something - anything - that will happen in 2015.

The safe, popular picks were one of Hawthorn, Port or Sydney to salute in the AFL, for the Saints to remain in the cellar and for Rory McIlroy and/or Scott to take a major. There was less consensus on the year's leading Test scorer (Kumar Sangakkara of Sri Lanka was 2014's most prolific).

As the lunch lingered on like the Essendon case, I scrawled down the unimaginative prediction that Michael Voss would end 2015 with a senior coaching gig somewhere. In hindsight, this would be the better, if less specific, bet: That the avid "sportsmen" at the lunch would derive more pleasure from 2015 than they did from 2014.