The first Grand Slam tournament of the 2022–2023 snooker season ended on Sunday by Mark Allen to the party. The Northern Irishman captured the sport’s second most prestigious tournament, the UK Championship, by knocking down the Chinese Ding Junhui.
Allen, 36, and Ding, 35, have been among the sharpest top of snooker for more than twenty years, so in the big overall picture, nothing new on the snooker front – even if Allen was victorious in the UK for the first time.
Snooker is in many ways living its golden age. It is the most watched sports format on the global sports channel Eurosport. On the professional tour, there are enough tournaments for every departure, although competing in China has not yet come into question due to the country’s corona policy.
Allen and Ding must be counted as teenagers when talking about today’s successful snooker. While the average age of the players who reached the quarter-finals in the UK Championship tournaments organized at the end of the last millennium remained around 28, this year the average age of the top eight players was 38 years.
Successful people are getting older year by year, and the breakthrough of the new generation is coughing badly. At this rate, the final of the ranking tournament, where both players are 50 years old, is only a matter of time.
Nostalgia is selling right now, but for how long? Snooker’s umbrella organization doesn’t seem to be interested enough in what happens behind the sharpest point. Or has been for years.
O’Sullivan as steep
When there is a public debate about the state of snooker, the most successful and popular player of all time Ronnie O’Sullivan has been a so-called statement machine for the journalist throughout his career.
O’Sullivan, who won his seventh world championship in the spring at the age of 46, did not disappoint this time either.
When a British Broadcasting Corporation studio presenter Hazel Irvine asked O’Sullivan at the UK Championship who he thinks currently has the best talent to become snooker’s next all-time great, the answer was resounding.
– No one has, O’Sullivan said.
– Some have the ability to win a few tournaments, but maintaining the level is the hardest part, he continued.
In keeping the level, O’Sullivan hits the nail on the head. In the last ten years, not a single new name has risen to the top of the snooker world. The previous player who made it to the big leagues broke through in 2011 Judd Trump.
After Trump, he has performed most consistently in the top bands Kyren Wilsonwho does not have a single Grand Slam victory (World Championships, Masters or UK Championship).
In the past ten years, only a Chinese youth has reached the Grand Slam tournament victory Yan Bingtao (Masters 2021) and his compatriots Zhao Xintong (UK Championship 2021). Neither has been able to maintain the level that O’Sullivan was calling for after their victory.
In the same studio interview, O’Sullivan said that he has never had a problem competing in bright lights. He spoke of an innate ability to love pressure and big plays.
– You can’t teach that. “You either have that skill or you don’t,” O’Sullivan said.
This is where O’Sullivan falls to simplifying things.
Your past is forgotten
Let’s go back in time briefly to the end of the 1980s. Although snooker now enjoys unprecedented international popularity, the attention it received in the cradle of the sport, the British Isles, in the 1980s was such that there is no going back.
O’Sullivan was already hitting 100-point streaks at the age of 10 and made his TV debut in 1989, aged just 14. He won his first Grand Slam, the UK Championship, a week before his 18th birthday.
O’Sullivan is arguably the most talented snooker player of all time. However, his achievement cannot be explained by mere innate competitive gifts and millions of punch repetitions made in training.
The professional tour has changed radically since 1992, when O’Sullivan made his professional debut.
In 1992, any player who bought a tour license could enter the professional tournament, and in an instant, well over 500 new “snooker professionals” were found. The young talents could play to their heart’s content, because the game system was tiered: for example, to get to the stage where there were 128 players left, they usually had to win seven matches.
When O’Sullivan’s career is recounted in the context of star moments, one of the highlights is often the record 38 consecutive professional bouts he won in his debut season.
This record, which still stands, should not be underestimated, but the victories are from qualifiers. He played 76 of them in his debut season, of which he won no less than 74. In the 1992–1993 season, first all qualifying matches were played in the summer, and only then the main series of the tournaments throughout the year.
When O’Sullivan breaks records, the focus is naturally on his feats, but in the name of fairness it would be appropriate to tell at least once how O’Sullivan did in his debut season in real games after the victorious qualifiers.
Answer: not well. O’Sullivan qualified in seven of the season’s nine ranking tournaments, but after reaching the televised main draw of 64 or 32 players, he advanced to the top eight just once. In all other competitions, he was left out of the top 16 in the final results.
There was no information about the innate winning machine.
Although O’Sullivan won the aforementioned UK Championship the very next season as the youngest player in history, it is fair to ask whether his confidence would have been at the level necessary for a breakthrough without the backing of 74 qualifying wins.
A completely different game
For today’s talents, such a tailboard is just a dream.
The professional tour has long been a meeting place for 128 players, to which the international umbrella organization has made access from outside extremely difficult.
If a player does not claim a professional right from various qualifying tournaments before July, he will practically be left with nothing for the majority of the year as far as competitive snooker is concerned. I did this because, unlike before, the joint competitions of amateurs and professionals are under a rock.
If, on the other hand, the young player passes the screening required by the professional right, in the opening season, he will be drawn for each first-round match against an opponent who is ranked 1-64 in the world. The possibility that the opening opponent is from among the top 16 in the world is therefore 25 percent each time. In practice, the player can avoid this only by hitting through immediately. It’s been quiet.
Among other things, Zhao Xintong, one of snooker’s biggest future promises, in his debut season (2016–2017) faced legends of the sport such as O’Sullivan, of John Higgins and by Mark Williams (twice) in addition to being among the top players in the 2000s Shaun Murphy’s, Ali Carter’s, by Stephen Maguire and Barry Hawkins as well as those who have appeared in the World Cup semi-finals since then by David Gilbert and by Gary Wilson.
When O’Sullivan was studying the game, there was no knowledge of such a cavalcade of stars meeting right at the handshake.
Xintong and other players scarred by stardom have had to practice professionally against snooker’s dinosaurs, while the still-popping seniors got to practice playing under the TV lights against each other 30 years ago in the constantly televised junior tournament.
They were organized not thanks to the talent of O’Sullivan and his generation, but to the already prevailing snooker boom, which was led by the stars of the 1970s and 1980s such as Steve Davis, Jimmy White and Alex Higgins.
O’Sullivan, who got to enjoy the system, should remember this when he gives a thorn in the direction of today’s young people who are striving from a completely different breeding ground – a much more brutal one.
It’s a shame if a superstar who has the unreserved respect of his teammates doesn’t understand how to respect his roots.
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