The ubiquity of modern sport is undeniable. It is, though, not inevitable—at least not in its present form. As James Kelly writes in his study of sport in early modern Ireland, “what is popular in the sporting realm today may not be popular tomorrow. There may, in other words, be a day, when the contemporary public obsession with team games will be no more and the great modern stadia will stand empty—like the Roman amphitheaters—as monuments of a bygone era” (28). Not that Kelly imagines a world without sport; rather, he imagines that that the sporting world would “assume a form that reflects the mood, attitude, and cultural language of the people then living, just as it did in the late early modern period.” The world of sport charted by Kelly is at its best when it deals with the spread of British forms of sport to Ireland.

The book opens with a remarkably detailed account of the rise to preeminence of horse racing in Ireland through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is an impressive piece of research that documents the slow, steady expansion of horse racing in Ireland through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the point where it can legitimately be presented as the most successful sport in Ireland and the first “to make the transition from an occasional, into a structured, and identifiably modern, recreational activity. It was also the only sport, other than hunting, to achieve a truly national profile” (29). The scale of Kelly's endeavor is apparent from even a cursory glance through footnotes that are awash with scores of references to horse racing drawn from the burgeoning world of the press. Central to the spread of horse racing were the country's landowners, while municipalities and corporations also promoted racing as a way of advancing themselves. This is not, of course, a story of unfettered growth; political and economic upheaval brought setbacks and a pattern of regional rise and decline, but by 1800 horse racing was the island's most popular and best-organized recreation.

Kelly also offers a detailed overview of the spread of hunting, and he describes a sporting world that extends across sports such as bowling, tennis, athletics, handball, long bullets (road bowling), pugilism, wrestling, cricket, and pitch-and-toss. There are limitations to what can be achieved; as Kelly asserts, “the shards of evidence that have been located sometimes fit poorly together and the resulting reconstructions can be more than ordinarily incomplete” (312). Throughout the book he repeatedly makes the point that there is an “evidential deficit,” which means that “it is not always easy to identify how a particular sport was played, organised, and still less to establish with certitude the social background of those who participated as organisers, players, spectators and, in the case of gambling sports, as punters” (347). Such sources as do exist are much more revealing of the sporting tastes of the New English; the games of other sections of the populace are less easily discerned.

When dealing with such games, Kelly is less sure-footed. This is apparent in the chapter of the book that deals with hurling, commons, and football. Here, Kelly writes that hurling and commons were stick-and-ball games that may have possessed a common origin but that they “constituted two distinct sports” by the late early modern period (268). Crucially, he writes that they “possessed different geo-spatial distributions. The most complete historic map of the sport not only suggests that commons was exclusively practised in the northern half of the country, but also that the area of possible overlap was so minimal as to imply that the two sports existed independently of each other” (268). The caution that Kelly had previously exercised in respect of the limitations of sources make such a claim surprising, for indeed there is evidence that renders so definite a distinction between hurling and commons unsustainable. Presenting “commons” as a winter game that involved the use of long narrow sticks and a hard ball, while the “hurling” played to the south is presented as a summer one using flatter sticks with a wider bas and a softer, bouncier ball is undermined by evidence such as the discovery of the soft, hair-hurling ball used for the “southern” game as far north as the bogs of Sligo. Further, in the 1840s men were imprisoned for “playing at commons” in Dublin and in Borris-in-Ossory in Queen's County (modern County Laois, beside the border with Tipperary). The words hurley, hurling, commons, camán, and shinty appear to have been used interchangeably in a variety of sources, further complicating the situation. Moreover, any study of the geography of hurling must take into account the playing of hurling in London through the second half of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth. This in itself is a timely reminder that exchanges of culture are so often multidirectional. In this chapter, the absence of reference to the work of Dónal McAnallen, Angela Gleason, Eoin Kinsella, Conor Curran, and Maighréad Ní Mhurchadha (notably her landmark article “Two Hundred Men at Tennis: Sport in North Dublin 1600–1760,” Dublin Historical Record 61, no. 1 [Spring 2008]: 87–106) is surprising.

In general, the strength of Kelly's work lies in the scale of primary sources revealed, while its weakness is the limited engagement with the existing literature on sports history. Nonetheless, this is a valuable book, one that brings a fresh perspective to the study of the history of sport in Ireland and opens up numerous questions worthy of further explanation.