Snooker Wont Survive The Decade

Barney Ronay
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010

One of the best things about sport is the constant sense of renewal. Every point, every game, every four-yearly cycle of self-delusion brings fresh hope. But not for snooker. After 80 years of proud professionalism, the game is unlikely to exist in its current form for much longer. By 2020, it could be an amateur sport again.

Such is the view of Ronnie O'Sullivan, who ought to know. He should be part of the solution to snooker's sliding popularity, the only remaining colourful character in a sport that has never seemed greyer. Instead, he sounds like a man ready to jump ship. "It just feels boring. The sport is dying," O'Sullivan told reporters last year. Admittedly his own solution – bring in Simon Cowell – suggests a career in management consultancy might be a stretch too far. But he is right: snooker, a sport-pages staple throughout the 1980s, when 18.5m people watched Steve Davis lose to Dennis Taylor in the 1985 World Championship final, seems to be lurching into terminal crisis.

This is a sport under attack from above and below. Money is tight. The golden era of lifestyle tie-in sponsorship – the fags, the booze – has long since passed. But there is also a sense of half-baked administration at play: the recent UK Championship final finished at midnight, too late to be covered in daily newspapers and out of reach of a family audience. The everyday circuit takes in half-empty exhibition halls in Bahrain and its results rarely trouble the mainstream media. At the same time, whatever grass roots snooker has are being aggressively theme-pubbed over as the late-night halls and snooker clubs close down.

Suddenly, snooker looks like a fading anachronism. A game of genuine skill and drama has been let down by laboured TV presentation. It didn't have to be like this – compare darts, which has been gingered up by jazzy formats like Thursday night Premier League. Snooker has tried nothing so radical, and achieved nothing more than a grating air of tentative razzmatazz. After its Snooker Loopy peak years, the sport is sleepwalking towards oblivion.

Of course, in a decade when there will be so many sports vying for our attention, other games look vulnerable too. Skiing and Formula One both face a different challenge in the shadow of a shifting ecological future. But none has a future as precarious as snooker. It already has a resigned look, slumped glassily in its chair, and looking like its thoughts have turned to the white-gloved handshake and the scattered sound of exit applause.