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Why I Love...late-night snooker highlights

Red snooker balls on snooker table
  • Posted at 11:57am
  • 11 December 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 2 comments

Mornings are for cricket, afternoons are for football, but late, drunken, solitary, post-pub nights in well-loved armchairs are for snooker. The exquisite serenity. The leisurely strolls around the table. The referee's immaculate white gloves polishing balls to a gleaming iridescence. The tranquil, understated commentary by Clive Everton or Dennis Taylor. "The table is playing well this evening, Clive." "Yes, it's a responsive cloth." Of course it is. It's a highly responsive cloth. But above all, the attraction has to be…well, it's the trigonometry.

Look, maybe it's a bloke thing. After a few beers in the pub, the pool table looks highly inviting. You slap down a couple of 50 pence pieces, wield a knackered cue, and challenge all comers in a misguided display of inebriated bravado. But pool? Pool is child's play. You smack a few balls around, they go in the pockets.

The snooker table, however, fills our television screen like an area of pristine parkland. It's about 15 miles long by seven miles wide. The pockets are the size of thimbles. Have you ever played snooker? For two average human beings, a frame of snooker lasts a gruelling eight-and-a-half months. So, after getting home from the pub, to watch these professionals manoeuvre spheroids around with jaw-dropping accuracy just blows our tiny little minds.

The word "precision" doesn't do it justice: it's advanced maths. Advanced maths, on responsive cloth. Equations featuring combinations of sine and cosine are solved with a twitch of an eyebrow and flick of a cue. The calculations involved in hitting three cushions to get out of a snooker would make Galileo soil himself.

"Incredible," murmurs Clive Everton, as we drool into our cheese on toast. "He's going to have to use the extended spider rest," whispers Dennis Taylor. My God. Not the extended spider rest! And as the specialist equipment emerges from under the table, our eyes roll into the back of our heads and we dream, we dream of protractors, graph paper, set squares and pi, to about 400 decimal places.

But they're trying to spruce up the image of snooker. They have sped up the intro music by a few beats per minute and put an uptempo drumbeat behind it. They're trying to make it thrilling for a younger generation who have the attention span of a distressed sea bass.

But they've missed the point. We love the decorum, the polite applause. We like the fact that the referee doesn't yell the total of each break as it approaches a century. We sneer at the ludicrous nicknames the media give the players. Skeletor? The Ice Man? The Rocket? For crying out loud - these men are wearing bow ties and waistcoats. They are dressed for an ambassador's banquet. They are precision craftsmen.

Let us not demean them with absurd monikers. Let them just weave their wonderful magic, while our eyelids gently flicker and close, lulled by the beauty of a gorgeously judged backspinning shot, rebounding off the baulk cushion and settling nicely behind the yellow. Mmmm. Zzzzz.

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  • Posted on 12 December 2007
  • at 3:31pm
  • by Jones

Absolutely spot on, Rhodri. A confidently- struck-unerringly-accurate-black-into-the-corner-pocket of a blog. And very funny for it.

I find I really do want to roam around that huge expanse of luscious green beize when I'm drunk. And the hypnotic click of the balls and the soothing commentary often lull me into a dream where I do just that. So I have to disagree with neptune - a pair of commentators is fundamental. We need their murmuring to be constant, which means when there's not much going on it's essential that they have someone to compare notes with.

  • Posted on 12 December 2007
  • at 1:02am
  • by neptune

The comments by RhodriMarsden, were obviously 'Tongue In Cheek.' However, they had some merit. I do not see how he/she can use ' A Distressed Sea Bass,' as a comparison. How can thir minds be read? It has the somnolent, after a time, of cricket. Would it not be easier, if some players, in all sports, including snooker, allowed their natural expressions to show, instead of being preoccupied with being unemotional? They might even play better, and less time would need spending on composing themselves.

Why also, is their stereo, sometimes triple, commentary in sports? It is a case, in the BBC's transmissions of 'Jobs For The Boys/Girls,' as the knowitalls/summarizers, have usually never been winners. Snooker, particularly, is sucha self evident game. I accept, that there are usighted, or visually impaired viwers,who need audio accompaniment. The BBC, has been told to cut costs. This would be a good place to start. I would not miss the dour Messrs Dixon, and Lawrenson, to name two.

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