Ash Barty won the French Open, Hannah Green won the PGA and Sally Fitzgibbons became the women's surfing world number one. Nice going Australian women!

And an English woman, Fallon Sherrock, just a couple of days ago, became the first woman to beat a male darts player in the PDC World Championship.

You'd have to consider that 2019 may, in retrospect, be seen as a very good year for women's sport. It's hard to see it being remembered all that positively in the more general sphere.

The thing is, the vast majority of sports reporting and conversation this year has been about the off-field stuff and general peripheral issues. These things have loomed so large that games themselves have been overshadowed with very little focus on actual athletes and their accomplishments.

Rugby league is a fine example. It has been a circus. The players' drunken antics - assault charges, rape charges, scandals surrounding the distribution of sex tapes... the League's attempts to remedy the troubles etc.

We had what has to be considered a refereeing crisis, with far too many games being decided by dodgy refereeing decisions - one of which being the actual grand final - and all this despite 'the bunker' and other such measures supposed to ensure that these things will not be gotten wrong.

We had an inordinate amount of draws, which aren't allowed to be draws anymore, so we had a bunch of games decided by 'golden point,' which in my view, and I'm far from alone here, makes an absolute mockery of the preceding 80 minutes.

And so we've imported a Mr Fixit from the Racing industry who has now outlined a set of proposed 'improvements' which strike me as, at best, unnecessary and, more accurately preposterous. We await the 2020 season with some trepidation.

Horse racing? A shocking year as the hard to stomach underbelly of the industry was exposed on a number of fronts - all slaughterhouses and jiggers it appeared there for a while. The backlash was such that even the iconic Melbourne Cup took a numbers hit. They've promised to lift their game and we'll just wait and see I suppose.

The Matildas and the Wallabies hit the international stage for two World Cups. Against expectations neither of them did any good. Did we discuss their form, individual performances, strategy? No. We were concerned with the coaches - the consensus being that the one that was sacked shouldn't have been (Stajcic) and the one that kept his job should have been rissoled (Cheika).

Tennis? Tomic, Kyrgios...

Cricket? The ball tampering thing hangs over us in a dreadful way and we began the season with those three still banned from our representative side. It's a sad and shocking state of affairs, the stigma of which I don't see departing in a hurry.

For a cricketing nation still copping it for Trevor Chappell's infamous delivery, it was the last thing we needed.

Anyway ... we failed at the World Cup with a very ordinary performance. We retained the Ashes, 'retained' being the operative word. We didn't win them - the series was drawn 2-2.

Cricket also was plagued with umpiring trouble. Despite the World Cup final being described by many as one of the greatest games of all time there was some controversy in that several ex-umpires decreed that the officials for the final were wrong in awarding England six over-throw runs in the last over. They should really only have been given five. It was a result changing error.

We also now have this situation in cricket, which I find quite strange (and which looks like becoming part of the ARL next year...) whereby captains are now often criticised for how they go about their use of the appeals and review process. It's no longer enough to bat/bowl, strategise and all the other stuff that has traditionally gone along with the captaincy. You now have to negotiate this whole other realm of replay action. I don't see how the game is, in any way, better for it.

All these changes are about satisfying the viewers (consumers) and we sit around discussing the coaches, the umpires, the good decisions and (more often) the bad ones; we bet on stuff and read about the endless array of player indiscretions. What's getting lost are the games themselves.

Here's to 2020 and, hopefully, sport being about sport, and the athletes, again.