Opinion: Ronnie O’Sullivan should have congratulated Judd Trump - but don't slam him for it
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Published 14/11/2022 at 11:39 GMT
Should Ronnie O’Sullivan have congratulated Judd Trump? Eurosport's Dave Hendon believes that yes, he should have. But the whole edifice of the professional game did not come crashing down because he chose not to, and people should not be too harsh in their damning assessments of the situation. After all, snooker players are humans too, let us not ever forget.
'I don't get it!' - O'Sullivan 'doesn't understand' Brown and Allen practising together before match
The UK Championship began in York at the weekend as it might more naturally be expected to end, with two players embracing.
Mark Allen and Jordan Brown have been friends since boyhood. They found it awkward being drawn to play each other and hard to set aside their mutual affection. Indeed, Allen started so badly that it seemed to have an adverse effect on Brown.
This is not a struggle all players have. There is an unwritten code of good manners and sportsmanship to which professional cueists are expected to adhere but when reality bites, the niceties start to fall away.
We hold snooker players to weirdly high standards compared to sports where we expect and often demand insurrection. There’s maybe something about the slow-moving, comfortable nature of the action that suggests pliability. It doesn’t seem like an environment in which anarchy should thrive.
Infringements, therefore, stand out. Debate still rages about whether it was disrespectful of Ronnie O’Sullivan not to shake Judd Trump’s hand after the latter’s maximum break during their Champion of Champions final just over a week ago.
Players and fans could not remember anyone else refusing to acknowledge a 147. It seemed especially harsh as Trump had been forced to endure the world’s longest man hug from O’Sullivan in the aftermath of the Rocket’s defeat of him in the world final last May.
“I get why people think it is an amazing thing to do, but for me, I don’t find it a difficult thing to do so when I see somebody else do it, I find it quite normal. The most important thing was I still had one more frame to play. It was 6-2 and I was thinking ‘I need to win this last frame’. I was probably in too much of a zone,” O’Sullivan explained of his actions in the Eurosport studio at the weekend.
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‘I don’t find 147s difficult’ – O’Sullivan on Trump handshake snub
On Twitter, where nuance goes to die, opinion was generally divided depending on long-held views on O’Sullivan himself.
The diehard Ronnie fans poured over the footage as if it was Abraham Zapruder’s video of the JFK assassination, insisting they had found proof that it was Trump who was at fault for not engaging O’Sullivan’s eyeline after the final black went in.
Meanwhile, the perennial O’Sullivan detractors effortlessly summoned foam from their mouths over this latest affront to the dignity of the game, stopping just short of performing a citizen’s arrest on the seven-time world champion. Everyone else kind of shrugged and concentrated on watching the rest of the match.
The incident became a talking point because snooker prides itself on etiquette. We like to think it’s a gentleman’s game, possibly because the players still dress as gentlemen from another era, all done up in smart clothes as if sitting down for dinner in a stately home before retiring to the billiard room for the rest of the evening.
It did not feel like a scene from Downton Abbey, however, when Gary Wilson threw his cue on the floor at the qualifiers last week because his opponent, Andres Petrov, fluked the frame ball to lead 4-1. Wilson also complained that Petrov was leaving the arena too many times between frames for toilet breaks, sparking a somewhat passive-aggressive Twitter discourse between the two players.
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Wilson tells referee 'he doesn't need the toilet' as opponent walks off
Snooker is a difficult and often cruel game in which luck can play a major part. If a player is losing, they tend to notice all sorts of things, real and imagined, which contribute to the sense that they are being hard done by.
At the Crucible in 2020, Anthony McGill was annoyed that Jamie Clarke was standing in his eyeline, sparking a confrontation between the two players. O’Sullivan made a similar complaint about Allen at the Champion of Champions a couple of months later.
In both cases, Clarke and Allen insisted they had done nothing wrong. Some observers questioned McGill and O’Sullivan’s motives, given that they had both been losing at the time. But cold analysis from afar fails to acknowledge the fact that, in the heat of battle, emotions run high.
Players will tell you privately who they think the stroke-pullers are when it comes to trying to put them off at the table, be it a sudden movement in the chair or an ill-timed jiggle of the ice bucket. However, the actual intent behind these small transgressions can never be proven one way or the other, so officials have a tough job in deciding who is in the right.
Each generation seems to want to believe that previous ones were better behaved, but the ‘gentleman’ players of yesteryear were not beyond aggravating one another. In his autobiography, John Spencer wrote of his great rival, Ray Reardon: “He was the sort of person who could laugh 24 hours a day if it was to his advantage".
Alex Higgins was hardly the greatest advert for etiquette, once greeting a young Stephen Hendry before a match with the words, “Hello, I’m the devil".
Higgins was an official’s worst nightmare. He once complained that referee John Williams was wrongly positioned. When Williams told him he was not in his line of sight, Higgins responded, “no, you’re in my line of thought".
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‘He’ll wish he didn’t do it’ – O’Sullivan on Wilson cue throw and toiletgate
Holding a snooker player to the standards of someone who has just been appointed Foreign Secretary is not a new phenomenon. On his debut appearance at the Crucible more than four decades ago, Steve Davis was lambasted in the press for eating a ham sandwich in the arena. His brazen snacking was apparently a huge show of disrespect. This was as a time when smoking in the arena was actively encouraged by tobacco sponsors.
One can only imagine Davis’ fate had social media existed back then. Perhaps this modern form of scrutiny is why players now seem more aware than ever of being seen to observe etiquette. The done thing is to politely tap the table after an opponent has played a good safety and raise a hand to acknowledge a piece of fortune, but these are conventions. There is no rule to say you have to do anything other than just play your own game.
These days any contravention of the imagined rules of combat can draw considerable criticism. Online observers appear to be less concerned with their own etiquette. Apparently, chalking your cue in someone’s eyeline is a much bigger crime than tweeting abuse to someone you’ve never met.
Should O’Sullivan have congratulated Trump? Yes, probably. But the whole edifice of the professional game did not come crashing down because he chose not to.
In general, snooker players are a sporting lot. But every now and again they deviate from the accepted path of behaviour. Why? Because, like you and me, they are human.
They do not deserve to be pilloried for that.
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