Snooker news - Ronnie O’Sullivan’s idea that he needs to improve smells worse than urine
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Updated 22/10/2018 at 13:52 GMT
Ronnie O'Sullivan has a flawless technique that does not need improvement whatever the five-times world champion will argue to the contrary, writes Desmond Kane.
Ronnie O'Sullivan in action.
Image credit: Eurosport
It remains an ancient sport that will send you snooker loopy, a hoary old game invented by British soldiers in colonial India in 1875 that continues to command military precision over 140 years later.
Like Mark Twain is wrongly attributed to have once said golf is a good walk spoiled, it was Mark Williams who could have said snooker is a good seat ruined. Or a good session interrupted.
Imagine enjoying a few social jars and frames on a Saturday night with your mates. Then actually witness Ronnie O'Sullivan, undoubtedly the greatest figure to perform with a snooker cue, play like them on live TV.
O'Sullivan could easily have been half shot in a 6-1 drubbing by Mark Davis in downtown Crawley. It was utterly bewildering when you consider what he produced to touch down in the semi-finals.
How else can you explain O'Sullivan running in a 15th maximum of his career on Wednesday afternoon on the same table before collapsing like an old Bill Werbeniuk waistcoat days later?
Perhaps we should not be all that surprised. It was not so long ago that the world champion Williams could not buy himself any form as retirement suddenly entered his mindset.
Aware that his history, most notably of winning the world title in 2000 and 2003, was all that he had left, he turned to the coach Stephen Feeney at SightRight, in what was a proverbial last throw of the cue, to improve his vision and technique on the shot.
It worked for Williams as he ended a six-year wait for a ranking title, conquering Belfast and Berlin before clasping a third world crown to his bosom last May.
Life begins at 43. In such a respect, you can see why O’Sullivan, jostling for self-improvement and self-motivation, in his 43rd year would wish to subscribe to such a policy in his bid to find the elixir that would complement his world titles of 2001, 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2013.
But then unlike Williams who had nothing to lose last year, O’Sullivan has everything to lose and nothing to gain.
Not when you are coming off the most successful campaign in your 26-year professional career having won the English Open, Shanghai Masters, UK Championship, World Grand Prix and Players Championship plus a whopping £826,000 in prize money.
You cannot improve upon near perfection, but as we witnessed on Saturday night against Davis, there is plenty of room to slip behind the colours into a world of regret.
It is dangerous to look for snow when there is none falling. Especially when we are not officially out of British summer time. Yet O'Sullivan himself appears to suggest there is room for improvement.
“I have to be realistic,” he said prior to washing up in Crawley.
I’m in a rebuilding and reinventing phase of my game for the next year, 18 months or two years. I won’t play as many tournaments as the other guys. And my game will probably suffer because of that.
Why does it need to suffer? If O’Sullivan decides to rebuild his game, it could be the biggest act of self-harming since Colleen Nolan agreed to a rematch with Kim Woodburn.
At a venue that O'Sullivan claimed was a "hellhole" smelling of "urine", the waft of tomfoolery was stronger.
Successfully defending the Shanghai Masters in his first tournament of the season, and reaching the semi-finals of the English Open is hardly a mandate to rip it all up and start again.
The idea that Ronnie needs to rebuild his game is a bit like suggesting Michelangelo should have razed the Sistine Chapel to the ground because he missed a bit.
Professional sport is strewn with examples of figures who thought they needed to change to improve and ended up in a mental mess. Sandy Lyle and the late Seve Ballesteros were two glorious swashbuckling golfers of the 1980s who witnessed the erosion of their natural talent when they began to overthink things.
The Australian Ian Baker-Finch was champion golfer of the year at the Open in 1991, but retired a broken man in 1997 when he lost his technique and confidence.
It is wholly unwise to make unnecessary changes because form and confidence can leave and never return to the room.
Roger Federer decided to be more aggressive on the backhand side prior to winning the Australian Open and Wimbledon in 2017. But O’Sullivan does need to be more aggressive. Nor does he need to improve upon a flawless technique that can resemble a robot playing when he is fully engaged.
O’Sullivan alluded to the importance of technique during Eurosport’s coverage of the English Open.
If you look at a golfer like Rory McIlroy who is tight and compact then you look at Jim Furyk who is swinging out there, and swinging in there. As a sportsman, you are looking for stuff, and what can go wrong with that cue action.
It should be noted that Furyk's swing, for all his eccentricities, has enjoyed a technique reliable enough to earn him $68.4m and 17 titles on the PGA Tour.
O'Sullivan's cue action is like velvet. It is delivered on a straight plane with flair, purpose and accuracy. It looks more difficult for him to miss as he hurtles around the table with speed and menace.
One remembers asking Ronnie about the importance of how Lionel Messi’s legend was built from not getting bogged down with the technicalities of football during the Scottish Open last December when we had a quick tour of nearby Celtic Park.
"You just play the game the way you know how to do it,” he said. “If you told him (Messi) to stand in this position or mark this, he wouldn't know how to do it.
You've just got to express yourself. I don't go out there to do it. It's just how I've always played.
For all the sense of bravado, O’Sullivan does not turn up only for it all to click into gear. He works ferociously hard to maintain the levels of supremacy that endear him to the British public as a natural entertainer.
But history is a lesson for those who wish to absorb it: technique behind success needs to be respected rather than remastered. The 1994 Masters champion Alan McManus attributes the longevity of John Higgins in his 40s, the third member of snooker's class of '92 alongside O'Sullivan and Williams, to a flawless technique rather than voracious appetite for practice.
Struggling for form and latterly battling the dreaded yips, Neil Robertson remarked that on the cusp of 42, Stephen Hendry’s game had gone to pot during a 6-3 win in the first round of the Masters in 2011, his final appearance at an event that he had previously lifted six times.
"He has problems technically, and he has changed his cue action,” said Robertson. “His cue action is completely different from what it was in the 1990s. I think Stephen looks ok among the balls, but technically there are quite a lot of flaws there. It's always dangerous to mess about with things like that."
And it remains a clear and present danger to anyone. From the summit, there is only one way down in any sport.
As an array of tortured souls will testify, nobody loves you when you're down and out.
“Of course it’s psychological and, when you strike a cue ball, you’re supposed to accelerate through the ball," said Hendry in his autobiography
But as you tighten up you end up decelerating. By 2012 my game was shot. You’re sitting on your chair watching players leagues below you play shots you can’t. That destroyed me.
One suspects it is only the mental grind that O'Sullivan only needs sharpened rather than the long game. Particularly at the World Championship when the ability to handle pressure and stress becomes like a survival of the fittest amid the vacuous social media vortex.
Any other unforced manoeuvre brings risk and chance into the equation in a sport that is always about the percentage game. There is nothing that anybody can bring to the table that O'Sullivan does not already possess.
Desmond Kane
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