What was he doing under there???
What was he doing under there???
Ronnie through with the two frames he needed in about 18 minutes.
Just being a bit weird and noseyOriginally Posted by Ian
This second session in the Trump vs. Bingham match has been genuine club standard.
was gonna say, is that the worst anyone has ever played at the crucible while still winning 5 frames on the bounce?
Yeah there have been some absolutely rotten shots.
Bingham's miss on the black was terrific.
In Yan we trust (to stop the shitshow continuing).
Yan
These two now having a go at shots that wouldn't be out of place in one of my games.
Today's winner: the middle aged bloke who clearly thought he was a bit of a legend for pretending to scratch his nose so he could give the finger.
Just watched this.
There's so much going on here. Ah, you like fish and chips! Gimme some elbow, brother. Yan looking perplexed as he just digs through his fridge. Rob not taking no for an answer on trying to get his signature dish. "The coat is SO SOFT!" "This carpet is absolutely phenomenal!" The cat having zero interest in coming out from under the sofa.
I like that a snooker prodigy has the same rubbish back garden that I did, but with added perv fence.
Simple cut to the corner leading to white into the middle is the bane of every [average] pub pool player in the land. Good to see it gets the pros too.
Mega clear up from Williams here. Yan has gone to bits a bit.
Just remembered why I stopped betting on sport 8 years ago
Great post match interview from Williams too.
Do hope he wins it.
I bloody love him. I genuinely think he's the main reason I haven't deleted the Twitter app on my phone.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/snooker/61241722
I missed this earlier.
Yeah I've not been a massive fan of ol' male pattern baldness, but I got a good giggle out of that. Maybe I have to like the cunt now.
Nah, I think you're safe. One joke doesn't make him not a total bore.
Average age of the semi-finalist is 42.75
If Bingham had of beaten Judd, we would have a 45yr old, 2 46yr olds and a 47yr old.
I wonder if anyone at the top of the game is noticing this.
What's the issue? Three generational players all came through together so naturally they're going to skew the picture while they're around.
Nout wrong with being old I say.
All three won the title pre 9/11, which is daft when you think about it.
On the one hand it's quite cool, but on the other it's the sign of a moribund sport, of which snooker has so many and the BBC have been highlighting them all fortnight - Stephen Maguire being a 'magnificent player' (he hasn't been for fifteen years), Jack Lisowski 'coming of age' (he's thirty years old ffs) are among my favourites.
The sport is crying out for someone actually young to come along and be an indisputable number one, moving things on as Davis and Hendry did. Problem is no one in the UK can play it anymore since the smoking ban and while it's clearly very popular in China, their players will take time to come through and they also have the obstacle of being over 6,500 miles from home when they do, in a land where everything smells of milk (although I see they're now embracing that more these days, might be part of the plan).
Now I'm older than some football managers I'm delighted to see snooker dominated by the mid-40s, it means I've still got time if I put the practice in. Watched the quarters last night and Higgins was absolutely sleepwalking his way out until Lisowski made it 12-11 which woke him up suddenly. It's odd watching on the red button as they don't cut to studio between frames so you're just watching the two players sitting side by side trying to to acknowledge each other accompanied by the ambient sound of crisp packets being rustled.
Does the smoking ban actually matter to young people seeing as they've known nothing different? Feels like a 'old man yells at cloud' reason to fall back on for the decline in quality of snooker players.
The problem is more likely one of exposure and accessibility. In the case of exposure, as has been said, it's a lot of middle aged men so if a young person does see it what's gonna draw them in and think "Man I wanna be like that round bloke."
And then as we've discussed before, just the fact that it's fucking expensive and I'm not sure when I last saw a snooker table outside of a snooker hall so you need to actively seek it out.
I'd be interested to know what the snooker scene looks like for young people in China. Is it as simple as them being aware that it's a way to hey out of the country if they just put the hours in and have some ability for it?
Stephen Lee, despite being a complete crook, is/was making a small fortune out there coaching.
Isn't it more that the smoking ban effectively killed snooker clubs, and, as there are now far fewer clubs/tables/places you can play [snooker tables take up a huge amount of space better allocated to craft dining or, you know, housing] nobody really gets exposed to the game unless they really hunt it out? Young people not taking up cue sports is definitely a thing*. In our local pool league we were the young, carefree drinking team when we started out. 15 years later we remain the 'youngest' team, but have had to water down some of the other aspects.
*this is also probably linked to young people, in general, not going to the pub anymore.
I definitely concur with that. I was in the same boat re: pool, being the young team that tore up the league and as we progressed in age, no one younger came through. Most of us stopped playing completely, and the couple that kept it up are now on the IPA or Ultimate Pool circuits now.
I also played in a billiards league which was the same, only ten times worse for that problem and it doesn't even exist now. I was only ever a casual snooker player so don't know about the league situation but the club always had a decent amount of players, even if getting a table was never really an issue.
Last edited by Ben; 28-04-2022 at 08:36 AM.
The use of space is a good shout actually, why have even a pool table (let alone a snooker table) maybe bringing you in a couple of quid an hour if it's younger people who aren't drinking much if you could have another table for drinks / food.
I've said this before so I won't bang on but I'd spend a lot more time even just by myself playing some snooker or pool in my free time if it didn't cost something like eight quid an hour in my local places before you've even had a drink or whatever.
This is a perfect time to point out that I played for a pub team in the local league once and won the game, so have retained a 100% record for 20 years. Like Sam Allardyce's England career but with fewer pints of wine.
I played sometimes as a teenager. There was a club off the main road out of town, hardly in prime real estate. A good schlep to get there if you didn't have a car, but people made the journey. You'd go upstairs in what seemed to be an abandoned building and there was a bar, a small pool room, and a large snooker hall with 10-12 tables populated entirely by working class men of all ages (and me, I guess). There would be quite a lot of teenagers at the weekend but we had no money, obviously, so the money to run the place came from the grown men buying drinks and these men wanted to smoke inside.
You stop them smoking in 2006 (I was 18), the place closes within months. The teenagers in the area now can't and don't play snooker. Now it's luxury flats.
The sight of smoke smouldering from a Regal King Size under the table lights is a very vivid memory of my youth.
Are those men not still going to pubs though? I mean, if you've got to go outside to smoke when you're having a pint does that not come into the same thing?
I dunno, it's a weird one. I dunno how you get young people playing it without trying to herd them into snooker / pool halls. The ones near me are busy enough and with younger people BUT that's on the pool tables, of which there are many more. When I play snooker I don't see many people younger than me doing it but then I walk back to the bar through all the pool tables and there are loads of them.
I'd be interested to know whether pubs which still cling on to a "50p for a game" pool table see many young people playing there as it's a much cheaper option and you can just do a few games for a couple of quid.
And also whether student unions still have their pool tables. The ones I went to in Glasgow used to but that may be another thing that's fallen by the wayside. Pool is the obvious gateway drug to snooker, right?
Last edited by Ian; 28-04-2022 at 09:00 AM.
At school one of my friends lived in a pub so he had the key to the pool table and we'd play for free as it was the olden days when pubs closed in the afternoon and reopened later, the only step away from perfection was that he couldn't get the Spiderman arcade game to play for free as well. He was actually a dickhead but free pool, come on now
I'd love even to have the space / money for a pool table. I'd never be bored again.
Smoking over the table?
It's been covered, but the smoking ban closed a load of establishments where one would play it as it's almost impossible to make money from them now.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
Have the relevant snooker authorities in the UK had any bright ideas of what they might do about this in the intervening 15 years? I don't think Judd Trump wearing trendy trainers in the studio will cut it.
Are Higgins, Williams, O'Sullivan of 2022 worse than the players who were reaching the semi-finals in 2002 (the younger versions of themselves)? Because if the overall quality of snooker isn't dropping off, there isn't an issue, is there?
Is total tournament centuries a good measure? Because there's a positive trend there.
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I'd say all three collectively are as good as they were then, but individually they've all been better than they are now. The quality of snooker is fine at the moment and as good if not better than it's ever been, but the problem comes when the established names do start to decline (age surely has to see to that at some point) and there's no one to take their place, which is absolutely what we're looking at happening.
The youngsters coming through (from the UK at least) are genuinely tragic - Jimmy White, as an example to back that up, has only just dropped out of the top 100 and given how bad he is and has been for years, he shouldn't be anywhere near it.
I'm not sure the quality of the player ranked 100 matters very much, in the late 90s you still had the likes of Dennis Taylor and Willie Thorne higher than White is now.
I think it's a case of the top 50 generally being much better than it's ever been. You're right in that for a while there's been a lack of real generational talent coming through. Maybe we were just spoiled by Hendry, Williams, O'Sullivan & Higgins all appearing at the same time?
Is there any other sport/game/discipline where there is 1 person under 30 in the world's top ten?
I've just checked darts actually and that's also 1/10 (Belgian, the snooker one is Chinese). The decline of British pubs theory is the one.
Get the public schools to put up some snooker tables. Everybody else will be too busy choosing between food and warmth for snooker to be an option so get the poshos involved.
Glad to see Williams on the board. How can the table not settling into the carpet for the one-table setup not be considered?
Trump looks on it.
There's always a chance when you try to bash one in but Williams got seriously unlucky with that shot there where the red rolled past the cue ball into perfect position for Trump.
Don’t know why he hit it that hard though.
How are people so bad at turning off their cunting phones lol
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