Wrong Side of the Blue
It's time to head to God's Own Country for my annual baize migration
Every year, we happy few who play snooker every Wednesday night at the Raging Ball in St Albans make the pilgrimage to the Crucible in Sheffield for the World Snooker Championships. We’ve been doing it for years, staying at the same hotel, lunching at the same pizzeria, checking out evensong at the cathedral (yep, it’s all pretty rock ‘n roll, not at all like a BBC 2 Play for Today about five middle-aged gents driving north for an afternoon snooze and a medium hot curry).
Long story short, we’re off again tomorrow morning, with the enticing prospect of seeing Ronnie O’Sullivan play on Sunday morning. For half a dozen years I wrote a column for the Idler magazine about snooker, or rather about our little group playing snooker, a kind of biting, Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘reveal all’ series about the nitty-gritty of what it is like to be nearly a half-decent player. With the 2023 championship in full swing, this seems like an appropriate moment to treat you to one of those perky columns from the back catalogue. I hope you enjoy it (and for the agents/publishers/literary mafia among you, let me assure you that I have a pitch for a snooker book along these lines ready to send out at the slightest eyebrow-raise of interest).
Why I’m Errol Flynn instead of Kevin Costner on Wednesdays
For most of the week my life is largely uneventful. There are school pickups to be sorted, meals to cook, and bins to forget to put out on the right night. But for three hours on a Wednesday evening, I turn into a fearless swashbuckling pirate, twirling my moustachios as I morph seamlessly from Kevin Costner into Errol Flynn.
I’m rather suspicious of the ‘you are what you eat/read/listen to’ school of thought since arming yourself with the knowledge that I like cheese and apple sandwiches, Tintin, and Dean Martin’s greatest hits provides limited psychological insight into who I am. Similarly, anybody who attempts to make generalisations about my approach to life from my style of playing snooker is going to be sorely disappointed. Because while during the week I am careful to put my slippers on around the house in case I slip on a rug, on Wednesday nights I become a fearlessly optimistic scallywag.
I am not alone. On the basis that we are as likely to muck up a safety shot on the yellow as we are to miss a long pink, all five of us at Wednesday Night Snooker Club would regard it as overly cautious not to make a stab at those six points. It sounds immodest, but the truth is that there's no pot that a professional can make that we can't match. I can even play O’Sullivan-style with my other hand if necessary (well, a bit).
No, what marks us off from them is the consistency. Yes, we can pot red, black, red, maybe black, maybe at a real push red, but that's the nearest we’re realistically going to get to a maximum. I've hit some reasonably decent breaks, but they've all involved getting out of position, taking yellows and browns, and basically clinging on for dear life while the cliff crumbles beneath my cue. And it's not just the talent, it's also the concentration that's required: I just don't think I can keep my game mentally together for that long, especially without a drink. Three frames on the trot is really about enough.
The truth is we have nothing to lose by taking on a table-length double. Shaun ‘The Magician’ Murphy might wince at the thought of trying a triple plant with the balls several inches apart, but then he is playing for big money. We are playing for fun, not the mortgage. I used to play regularly against a friend of a friend who was a decent bloke but was the dullest player to compete against because he only ever went for a pot when he had more than a 50/50 chance of getting it. Where’s the release from a busy week of work in that? Where’s the glory? Where’s the romance? In a fit of wild bullishness, I sometimes even try to get a snooker on the final black if I’m more than seven points behind.
But, rather ironically, there is one shot that we almost never try…
It's easy to be unsporting in a frame of snooker but the five of us tend to go the other way, not simply encouraging each other to play better or build higher breaks, but also (depending on the situation) not always putting up every foul shot and overlooking a mild accidental nudge on a ball. We play near the rules rather than by them.
And since we're all gentlemen of honour and fine standing, it always seems a bit, well, sneaky to attempt to snooker each other. Not unsporting as such, but somehow a departure from the usual genial atmosphere. This is obviously ridiculous. Nobody would suggest that Barry Hawkins is somehow behaving dishonorably by putting Marco Fu in a horrible snooker. Quite the reverse, The Hawk is rightly applauded for the fine touch.
In our frames, however, where we tend to go for everything, we only play safe when there is truly nothing on or simply to break up the monotony of missing pots. So by trying to lay a snooker, we're departing from an unwritten rule and anyone who attempts one is very likely to be met by a communal intake of breath and a big ‘Ooooh’. “What,” we ask our opponent when we see them considering trying to lay a snooker, “what would your mum have said about that?”
The other reason we don't usually do it is that we're not really good enough.
I am deeply envious of your visit to the snooker. I've been to the Masters but not to the Crucible - one year I shall go