Don’t know about you, but I used to love watching Snooker on the telly.  Way back in the day (the 1980’s) it was just required viewing in our house.  We even had a table, and my brother and I dreamed of being the next Steve Davis or even better, Jimmy White. The only trouble with our table was the fact that the 1″ diameter balls had a seam and that it was only 4′ long.  Sorry, the only two things wrong with our table were the facts that the 1″ diameter balls had a seam and that it was only 4′ long and the there was never any room to cue properly. No, sorry the only three… that’s enough of a feeble Monty Python effort.  We loved that old table and it gave us hours of fun.

Eventually we graduated to a 5′ pool table for which we bought a pucker (i.e. without a seam) set of Snooker balls.  The only trouble with that was the fact that they were just too big for the table.  There was no way that you could play Snooker properly as the table was just too full of balls.  Mind you, the pool balls were the proper, old fashioned spots and stripes (none of your reds and yellows nonsense).  Consequently our house became a bit of a mecca (very small m) for the local kids and we regularly held pool competitions which ran right up until tea time.

But then Stephen Hendry came along and the romance of Snooker faded almost as soon as it had appeared.  To be fair to Stephen, he was metronomically brilliant but he just didn’t have the force of character to keep me interested. For all the jibes about his being ‘quite interesting’, Steve Davis was the King of the Green-baize for me.