Wembley Masters 2009 review

The recent Masters at Wembley was one of the most entertaining tournament’s snooker has seen in recent memory. The competition saw a record number of centuries and included five in a row for the first time in a best of 11-frame match between Stephen Maguire and Neil Robertson.
 
But it isn't just for the successes on the table that the Wembley tournament of 2009 will be remembered.
 
During the week of the Masters BBC2's Newsnight featured a report on the state of snooker following Ronnie O'Sullivan's claims that the sport was 'dying'. 
 
In a breif interview, Christopher Cook, a cultural historian, suggested that snooker's time 'had passed as far as television was concerned'. On the possibility of the sport being invigorated with a re-styled makeover as darts has seen, the commentator claimed that snooker took itself too seriously to go down such a gimmicky route.
 
The latter statement at least, certainly seems to be true. Stephen Hendry, Steve Davis, John Parrott and Terry Griffiths have all publicly rejected the idea that snooker needs 'sexing up'. 
 
I recently put the question of the game's current status to Jimmy White and his response was: "We’re not in as much trouble as people say because there's still six million people playing the game [in the UK] and millions upon millions more in China." 
 
The 1986 World Champion and Eurosport commentator Joe Johnson had a similar view: "People seem to pick up so much more on all the bad things that are said about snooker. There's a lot of jumping on the bandwagon and people wanting to knock the game. All it needs is for people to start singing from the same hymn sheet and talking about the good things in snooker."
 
Indeed, O'Sullivan himself felt the need to clarify his initial comments made at the start of the Wembley tournament. Despite the intangible parallels drawn between snooker and darts, the sports biggest draw later spelt out the obvious that snooker cannot be played in a similar atmosphere to darts.
 
O'Sullivan's headline grabbing press conference made sure of more than average coverage in the newspapers back pages. For some, his damning indictment of the sport's current state and news of him smashing up his cue in a fit of temper was perhaps just what the tournament start needed.
 
Bad publicity is better than no publicity in some cases. It's conceivable however, that O'Sullivan's comments were more borne out of frustration at the prospect of playing poorly attended ranking events in the Middle East for nominal prize money rather than the lack of interest in the game.
 
Perhaps a reality check is needed given the gloomy picture being painted of the sport?
 
Peak viewing figures of the final from Wembley reached 3.1 million, comfortably beating Match of the Day 2 on BBC1 and Channel 4's Celebrity Big Brother by close to a million.
 
To give that figure a wider context the much-hyped recent return of Jonathan Ross's Friday night light entertainment chat show with broad appeal received 5.1 million. Of course, snooker can no longer command TV audiences of 18.5 million, as did the 1985 World Championship final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis.
 
But that is attributed to a rapid decline in television audience figures in general caused chiefly by the internet rather than snooker's lack of appeal.
 
It's an almost forgotten programme now but the BBC's Big Break showed that snooker can and has mixed it with the best of light entertainment in the past. The hugely popular TV quiz show spanned 11 years with 14 series between 1991 and 2002.
 
It is the opinion of Cook that snooker perhaps needs to discover a sense of irony with an ability to mock itself to re-engage with a wider television audience.
 
For a sport that once spawned a prime-time programme hosted by Jim Davidson and John Virgo – that is irony!