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Pot blackout in Australian snooker coverage

Roar Rookie
23rd April, 2013
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Roar Rookie
23rd April, 2013
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1131 Reads

If you watch snooker, you have a problem. Actually, lots of them. You’re probably losing your hair, your ability to maintain sexual performance and, though you don’t know it yet, your life.

You might wonder why you need treatment for erectile dysfunction and life insurance for your family when you also apparently need dating services, but you fit the profile.

When you watch the World Championship on Fox Sports in June, or maybe July, you’ll know what to expect, you poor bastard.

Among your problems is that the World Championship is in fact taking place in April and May (the 20th to the sixth, to be precise. Now).

Snooker fans who have survived their spouse’s scheme to bump them off and run away with the payout – the frequent subtext of life insurance ads, as I’ve found in my accidental scholarship on them – might wonder why it takes so long.

They might also wonder if they wouldn’t be happier, on balance, had it taken no time at all. Not happier in themselves (how could we be? We’re impotent and our elderly wives want to kill us) but happier on average and in aggregate, lifted by the rising tide of a happier, more diverse, bigger audience.

Who knows, there might be one out there. Few sports are better on telly than at the venue; snooker is one. Spectators at snooker venues wear headphones transmitting the BBC commentary team’s sotto voce sportsman’s night repartee.

Yet here in Australia it’s, well, snookered.

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We’re denied the official live stream we might get, seemingly because of the delayed trickle we do.

Fox Sports shows the Australian Goldfields Open and the Premier League but the big tournaments come as packaged serials, months late, as if they’d been sent for a re-edit to purge some racy content.

Eurosport broadcasts snooker everywhere but on its local affiliate, which prefers more dinky-di entertainments like handball and biathlon.

The closest you can get to a Eurosport broadcast here is a YouTube upload of the feed, helmed by a garrulous Romanian.

Which, you might have gathered, is a shame. The rather naff tagline of this year’s World Championship, ‘experience history in the making’, unwittingly hints at what the tournament offers.

Snooker has been captive to its history: 1985 and all that. Those innocent days when, thanks to Big Tobacco’s benevolence, snooker players earned more than bankers and footballers.

But the quality of snooker has never been better. Its play is as rich now as the best Test cricket.

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Rapid scoring alternates with learnt safety exchanges. The firm of Parry and Thrust operates with an alluring complementariness.

And there can hardly be a more exacting test of technique and fortitude in sport than a 35-frame World Championship final. Two players and two days. Four sessions of perhaps four hours each.

Adding to the interest, there is the return of Ronnie.

Ronnie O’Sullivan is just ‘Ronnie’ to those of us in the funeral plan demographic. The defending champ, Ronnie is also a sublime artist, the Roger Federer of snooker, except with a monobrow instead of a monogram.

But unlike Federer too, endearingly. With a typical mixture of insouciance and churlishness, Ronnie once walked out of a televised match because he felt he wasn’t playing well enough.

It’s hard to imagine Federer saying during a hit-up “Sorry, I don’t think I can play unbelieveable today,” and retiring down the race.

Which of the many Ronnies shows up will be crucial. He goes from prodigy to prodigal too easily for anyone to guess.

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After last year’s win he gave up competitive snooker for exhibition matches, as if he’d ever played another kind. Can he emerge from his sabbatical to beat such a strong field? His first-round victory, 10 frames to four, suggests he can.

Meanwhile, for the parochial, there is our own Neil Robertson. World number two and 2010 champion, Neil Robertson. Favourite, Neil Robertson.

Not that I necessarily want to see what he might do if he wins. In 2010 he was merely wrapped in an Aussie flag like a marathon runner in a space blanket.

Lately, however, Robertson, as gracious and well-spoken as Adam Scott, has taken to contrived whoops and shadow uppercuts.

That said, there is something pleasingly incongruous about a 30-year-old man in a bow tie raging at victory. Where else could you see that?

Not, alas, on TV in Australia any time soon.

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