Class, pure class. Doesnât want the interval Trump is reeling Williams is rolling.
Williams is on fire.
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Some interval reading
Snooker knows itâs cool and just keeps on rolling along
Keith Duggan: the game remains blissfully indifferent to modern demands and constraints of time. A frame will take as long as it takes
about 10 hours ago
Irelandâs Alex Higgins lines up a shot during the 1994 Embassy World Snooker Championships at the Crucible t in Sheffield, England. Photograph: Mike Cooper/Allsport
One of the biggest debates about snooker concerns whether it is a sport or merely a game. Thereâs no correct answer, of course, because it has never been the right question. Snooker exists on a different plane. Itâs not so much a sport or a game as a balm for the soul in a battered world.
There are many of us who had wrongly assumed that snookerâs golden age had irredeemably passed: that it was bound to the scrap heap of glittering late-20th century cultural icons like Spitting Image and Grange Hill and Yes, Minister and Rubikâs Cube.
Even during its heyday, in the four-channel TV-land dominated by bad news and Blind Date, snooker was a gloriously eccentric proposition. Here was an 18th century Raj game that somehow made for cross-generational entertainment in the awakening era of colour TV, with its dandyish etiquette, its hushed atmosphere and a louche cast of characters whose lifestyles, the newspapers breathlessly assured us, made the various members of the Rolling Stones look like a cautious accountancy firm.
If the mass-audience high point was the black-ball final of 1985 between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis, snooker enjoyed an extraordinary run through the entire decade. Sheffield, the world championship, was the be all and end all.
Snooker never courted its audience. It was never hip or bothered with fashion and has moved with the times only insofar as the snooker arena is no longer wreathed in tobacco smoke and the playersâ side-tables no longer resemble the end-scene of a particularly heavy all-nighter.
The stars never conformed to any physiological type but they tended to share a vampiric paleness caused by childhood daytimes spent mitching school and perfecting the craft that brought them to this point: the Crucible. (Is there a more perfectly named sports venue?)
Anyone who ever attempted a game of snooker even once understood that it was difficult to the point of daftness, and even now the television cameras, with all the flash angles, can never fully convey the unfathomable scale of the table when you queue behind the white ball.
At the Crucible the games were on television at novel hours â mid-morning, in the afternoon, late into the smoky night. Watch if you want, was the message. And millions were drawn, choosing their favourite players â Alex or Stephen or Kirk or Steve. Millions were hooked. Snooker became a craze.
If itâs true to say that snooker probably lost a good portion of that army of 1980s devotees as the millennium turned and time sped up and everyone disappeared down the rabbit hole of technology and infinite entertainment options, then itâs also true that snookerâs devotees didnât care. Snooker kept doing its thing and its profile stayed just about mainstream through the turbulent genius of Ronnie OâSullivan and the annual showcasing of the world championships.
It was as though the game knew it had you hooked. You could stop watching snooker for 20 full years and then, one idle afternoon, pause for a moment while channel surfing and find yourself slowly drawn in again to that curious arena where no sunlight is permitted and the crowd are always connoisseurs and time itself bends to the rhythms and quirks of the players at table. And that commentary! Whispered, reverential, absurdly grave and, for some reason, soothing.
And so, what a treat this weekend to see John Higgins and OâSullivan, both 46 years old, both early-1990s kids, squaring up for a world championship semi-final match which started on Friday morning and will end only when one of them reaches 17 frames â maybe Saturday, maybe Sunday, who knows.
Great secret
And that is snookerâs great secret. It remains blissfully indifferent to modern demands and constraints of time. A frame will take as long as it takes. That might mean a lightning 147 break by OâSullivan or something like the 85-minute marathon frame between Mark Selby and Yan Bintao last week, a nerve-wracking war or attrition which went down to the black ball.
In an age where psychologists are fretting over diminished concentration levels, how strange and wonderful to stumble across a TV show featuring a room full of people riveted (in blissful, collective silence) to a game that is as much an exercise in mental toughness and strategic thinking as it is flamboyant scoring.
A snooker championship game is one of the few remaining public arenas on earth where nobody is bothered with a mobile phone. Here is a world without rolling emails and instant social updates, a world wholly unconcerned with the updates from the Kardashians or Johnny & Amber; here is a culture which Becks, bless his tattooed heart, can never hawk the latest thing to the punters because the snooker crowd is surely the most unreadable and unimpressionable set in all of sport.
What snooker promises is an hour (or five) of escapism, when the casual viewer and dedicated follower alike is pulled from the anxieties of the world and slowly, magically drawn into concerns of the auditorium (âohhh . . . and Higgins has left himself a few centimetres short on the blue!â)
Itâs a solemn game, of course, but has never taken itself too seriously and can lightly wear the off-hand comments of OâSullivan, the spiritual inheritor of the bewitching facility showcased by Higgins and White, who is closing in on a seventh championship while claiming he doesnât really care if he wins again.
It wonât stop him trying, of course, because OâSullivan is no more immune to the magnetic pull of the game than anyone else. He just happens to be the most naturally gifted practitioner on the planet. âIâve tried a number of religions and gurus in my time,â OâSullivan declared, âbut they didnât do as much for my peace of mind as snooker.â
Mid session couldnât have come quick enough for Trump. Big first frame back coming up for Trump in particular.
Massive
Rachel asking Jimmy how heâd feel and what heâd do if he was in Judd Trumpâs position now.
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That was an ill advised red to the middle from Trump.
In the words of Johnny Giles, you feel Mark Williams has the greater moral courage here.
Tension.
Big chance now for Trump. He has to take this.
Bollox
Unlucky for once
Silly mistake and frame gone.
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Everything is missable now.
Canât get comfortable for the blue
This is a big frame
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Judd did well there
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Williams has a lovely touch
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Another brrakdown here.
Or not!! Savage pot.
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