The future of the World Snooker Championship has been a hot topic of discussion in recent years, but Richard Mann wants to see a radical change that doesn't necessarily involve the Crucible.
The World Snooker Championship should be moved.
That’s a line that has been said and written so many times in the last few years, and many more times to come, no doubt, with the Sheffield showpiece set to begin in just over two months’ time.
But it’s not the venue I’m talking about it here – and for what it’s worth, I can see both sides of that particular argument.
The position of the World Championship on the snooker calendar simply must change if this glorious old tournament is to retain much of what made it the magical event it once was.
And the harsh truth is, the World Championship is no longer what it is supposed to be: the crown jewel of the sport; the ultimate test; 17 days to find the best, the strongest, and the most well-rounded snooker player in the world.
In its current form, the World Championship is no longer fit for purpose, because it no longer satisfies that ambition. Where once it was about finding the player at the top of the tree, now it merely identifies the last man standing.
Snooker out on its own, but not in a good way
It’s always struck me as rather odd that snooker’s blue ribband is held at the end of the season, and it certainly doesn’t stack up with many other individual sports.
Golf, for example, is remarkably different. The Masters – in many people’s eyes the most important of the four majors – is held in April, a few months after the season begins in January. The PGA Championship follows in May, the US Open in June, and then The Open Championship in July.
Some might argue this is majors overkill, playing all four in such a short space of time, but people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
The snooker season generally starts in late-summer, yet we have to wait until December for the first Triple Crown. The Masters then follows straight after Christmas just a few weeks on from York, before a three-month wait for World Championship and the season finale in April.
The approach taken in golf ensures the top players have had a few months to get back into the groove following the Christmas break, but are a long way from being worn out by the time the Masters comes around. The best of the best given every chance to peak at the right time, to produce top-class golf on the biggest stage. As it should be.
Wimbledon takes place smack bang in the middle of the tennis season. The pinnacle of the sport carefully placed on the calendar when, in theory, the biggest stars will be fit and fresh, and playing their best tennis. Sounds good to me.
I won’t labour the point with other examples, but I’ve never been able to understand why snooker chooses to take the opposite stance.
Old habits die hard in snooker
Why is it deemed acceptable that we should view the World Championship as an event unique to the rest of the season and other tournaments? I’ve heard countless pundits say this over the years, but that’s no good thing.
The winner of the preceding tournament to the World Championship, the valuable Tour Championship – itself a multi-session format event designed in part to prepare players for the World Championship – has proven a horrible form guide for the Crucible.
Mark Williams was a brilliant winner of the Tour Championship last year and just a few weeks later, lost in the first round in Sheffield.
Neil Robertson and Shaun Murphy have both completed the Players Championship and Tour Championship double in recent years and headed to the World Championship holding outstanding form claims. In many eyes, they were tournament favourites those years, but both were knocked out early.
And I really don’t think we can blame either man.
For Robertson, the season in question was the 2021/2022 campaign, and by the time the World Championship began, the Australian had already won the English Open and the Masters, along with that Players Series double. There was also a runner-up finish at the World Grand Prix.
It’s become fashionable to knock Robertson for his apparent love/hate relationship with the Crucible, but he has more often just run out of steam come the end of a long, hard season. His heavy workload and continued excellence coming back to haunt him at the biggest tournament of all.
What a great shame.
In effect, Robertson was being punished for his own success. A desperate refection of the sport and its crown jewel.
World Snooker Tour later confirmed Robertson as Player of the Season, but it doesn’t sit right that the best player in the world at that time, following months and months of brilliant play, was left in a position where he was unable to perform at his best at the World Championship.
It makes a mockery of the whole event. The World Championship isn’t about finding the best player in the world anymore. If it were, the calendar would have been changed by now.
The players are well aware of this, too, and have started to act with their feet.
Tired Trump treads different path
It’s probably best to treat Ronnie O’Sullivan as a separate case, but Judd Trump, for so long a champion of supporting smaller events and trying to win them all, has this term skipped the Scottish Open and Welsh Open in an attempt to keep himself fresh for later in the season.
Trump has taken this approach to counter the ludicrous argument that says he is not a ‘great’ player if he doesn’t win another one or two World Championships before a quite magnificent career comes to an end. All that despite the fact he’s already one of the most decorated players in the history of the game.
I’ve been watching snooker a long time and won’t be alone in the belief Trump is one of the best players to have ever played this wonderful sport.
Trump has been the outstanding player of the last five or six years, but more often than not, we’ve seen a worn out, jaded version of Trump in Sheffield. It is to the detriment of other tournaments that he is now looking for a remedy.
Perhaps that’s fine, and Barry Hearn has always argued that it’s up to the players themselves to decide what events they compete in. But where does that leave the Home Nations Series? With no Trump or O’Sullivan in Wales, devalued would seem like an appropriate description.
It puts the players – especially those at the top who sell the most tickets and are most valuable to WST – in a tricky position. They accept how lucky they are to have so many tournaments to play in, but as Saudi Arabia and China put ever-increasing sums of money into the game and push to host more and more events, it’s inevitable there will be a squeeze somewhere.
For now, thankfully, the World Championship remains the pinnacle for most, but nobody is going to sacrifice the chance of a big payday in Saudi to keep themselves fresh for the last event of the season later down the line. Not even the World Championship. A Leisure Centre in Brentwood, yes, but not big bucks in the Middle East.
It’s not just about the money. Ultimately, what is most important to fans, and the paying public, of course, is the snooker. We want to see the best players at the biggest events, contesting finals and making great sport.
World Championship no longer fit for purpose
That’s not to say we should be pandering to the Trumps and the Robertsons, but at the moment, we are punishing them.
O’Sullivan was the same last year. He was the best player of the season and was chasing a historic hat-trick of Triple Crown wins to go with his imperious victories at the UK Championship and Masters earlier in the campaign. You’d have to go back to the days of Stephen Hendry to find a warmer pre-tournament World Championship favourite.
But by the quarter-finals stage, O’Sullivan was a spent force. It’s not an easy game, snooker. It might not be boxing or rugby, but it tests the mind over long periods of time, and O’Sullivan’s had been tested more than anyone else’s throughout a long season.
Stuart Bingham, clearly not the force of old but fresh as paint following a campaign where he had only reached one quarter-final, the Championship League apart, picked up the pieces as O’Sullivan inevitably waved the white flag.
Finally some rest for the Rocket who by the end just looked relieved it was all over. Bingham would later lose to Jak Jones, another who was as fresh as a daisy following a quiet campaign, in the last four, before Kyren Wilson lifted the trophy on Bank Holiday Monday.
Last season, O'Sullivan played 489 frames across the campaign, many of those in big events and high-pressure matches. Bingham played 351, Jones 342. 'Marathon of the mind'. 'Survival of the fittest'. That’s just bollocks.
I’m really not wanting to knock Wilson. He’s proving to be a brilliant world champion, something that he appeared destined to become a long time ago, but he wasn’t anywhere close to being the best player of last season. Far from it.
He didn't even qualify for the Players Championship and Tour Championship, so just like Luca Brecel the year before, he was fresh and raring to go in Sheffield – not tired and jaded like many others.
It never felt like a fair fight for O’Sullivan, or indeed Trump, who bowed out early in the piece following another busy and successful season.
I’m sure all those who attended the Crucible enjoyed their pilgrimage, as they always do. They were treated to some wonderful snooker in the early rounds, but the final weekend was drab and the standard wasn’t very good.
The snooker is suffering because of poor scheduling, and it shouldn’t be this way. Moreover, it does not need to be this way.
Don’t punish the achievers, the ones who have worked the hardest all season and have earned the right to head to Sheffield with genuine aspirations of becoming world champion.
Snooker must be open to change
Where you put the World Championship is open for discussion. Maybe it runs straight off the back of the darts equivalent. Maybe it becomes the centre of the Triple Crown rather than the final jewel in it. 17 days of Crucible magic in December, at the most magical time of all. A compromise for those who need it, with the world champion crowned at the end of the year.
Moving the UK Championship to October has always made sense to me, a jumpstart to the snooker season at a time when it is most needed. The Masters could be moved to late February or early March. That tournament is thriving right now, so any change is unlikely to have a detrimental effect on its popularity and standing.
But the World Championship cannot remain in April. Snooker is a winter game, anyway. We should determine who its star is when the days are short and the nights are long. Crucible long.
All snooker lovers will have their own thoughts and suggestions, and many don’t like change, so will instinctively shudder at such an idea. It’s a good job we aren’t reliant on innovation and groundbreaking new medicine, then, or aren’t avid users of new and ever-changing technologies.
But times have changed. The snooker calendar has changed and is now bursting at the seams because of overseas investment. Its outdated rules need to be broken in order to preserve the things we cherish most about the sport.
The World Championship cannot go on as it is, a tournament that most would agree has become a law unto itself and is now so far removed from the rest of the season that we treat new winners with caution – just as we did with Brecel.
We didn’t believe that one at the time, nor Jones’ run to the final last year, so we just shrug our shoulders and move on. I think we put Brecel’s win down to ‘big pockets’ that year didn’t we, because nobody really believed he was the best player in the world. Nothing we have seen since has changed our view on that.
The World Championship needs saving, but not necessarily from the Crucible or Sheffield City Council, but from the sport itself and ludicrous traditions that have allowed the jewel in snooker’s crown to drown under the rising waters around it. It’s time to act.
I’ll say it again: The World Snooker Championship should be moved.
