THE magic moment of the week, and indeed of this year's world championship so far, was Stephen Hendry's maximum clearance in his quarter-final against Shaun Murphy. The seven-time world champion later blamed the seventh-frame 147 for the fact he lost
the match, saying he was unable to regain his concentration after it, but it was a thing of beauty nonetheless.
The good news is that if you want to see it again you can do so on the BBC website. The bad news is that it has been edited and speeded up so it now lasts all of a minute. (You can find the whole thing if you look hard enough , but the offering on the main Scottish sports page takes just 60 seconds).
Maximum breaks do not go on forever – 13 minutes or so in this case – and when you watch them live the tension builds steadily until the last black brings sweet relief. Watching them later is not quite the same, but at least if you do so in real time you get some notion of how hard the player has had to work to achieve it, and of the nervousness in the audience.
Pressing fast forward and truncating them to a minute's duration is tantamount to turning them into a cartoon. And any physical feat is possible in cartoon land, so the magnitude of the achievement is lost.
For years now, with revenue and interest on the wane, the snooker authorities and their key partners such as the BBC have worried about the relevance of the sport and thought about ways in which it may have to change. Showing Hendry's 147 in no more than 60 seconds may be only a minor example of that worry, but it does indicate how the spirit of snooker could all too easily be compromised.
Because it's not about clearing the table in a minute. It's about patience, holding your nerve, biding your time. And of course the best players know that, even the ones who may be eager to turn a frame into a shoot-out.
Take the start of the semi-final between Shaun Murphy, the likeable chubby chappy known as the Magician, apparently because of his trick of making pies vanish, and Neil Robertson, an explosive antipodean whose nickname is The Thunder From Down Under. Which is meant to be flattering, but unfortunately makes him sound like a massive attack of flatulence.
Anyway, on Thursday night, as the players were introduced and prepared to begin the match, the BBC's pundits offered some wise words about what we were about to observe. Ken Doherty, John Parrott and the rest all came to the same conclusion. This, they said, would be a match between two men dedicated to long potting and solid break-building, and that no dull defensive tactics or extended passages of safety play would be on the menu.
Then play began, and the first frame lasted 49 minutes.
To be fair, Murphy's safety play was not the best, but there was a lot of it. Obviously the pundits concerned know quite a lot about snooker – most of them have won world titles, after all – but rarely can there have been an example of expert predictions so quickly being proven wrong.
Match analyses which miss their mark hardly count as major mistakes, of course. For snooker, the decision which must be got right concerns the championship itself, with the sport dividing between those who want it to stay at the Crucible in Sheffield and those who believe it would find a vast new audience in China.
This might not appear relevant to the 95 per cent or more of viewers who have never been to watch it live, but it could decide whether snooker stagnates and becomes an ever-more British concern, or whether it grows to be a far more international affair. You can understand why some players fear a loss of identity, because if snooker ever really takes off in China the sheer number of players from that country could crowd out many of the Britons. But the sport has to adapt, and embracing a wider world is the way to do it.
Only one man from outwith these islands has ever won the world championship, and that was almost 30 years ago, when Canada's Cliff Thorburn beat Alex Higgins. Moving the finals to China could make a vital difference, and if British players have to work harder to have an impact, so much the better.
The only difference for us viewers at home would be the end of unpleasing camera close-ups of fat, balding British blokes nodding off during late-night matches. And their replacement by fat, balding Chinese blokes doing the same.
The full article contains 805 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
