A sport that’s hardly in the pink

SNOOKER has always been full of shifty characters.

Skipping school to spend hours knocking balls around inside damp, squalid caverns must do something to a young person’s brain.

The result is that men emerge who wouldn’t think twice about, say, cashing a giro carelessly left on the sideboard at a mate’s gran’s house or assisting in getting rid of a lorry load of ‘misplaced’ merchandise around local hostelries — but who definitely, most certainly, love their mums dearly.

At least, that is the impression that is given and widely believed.

Even those who know very little of the sport appreciate this. Anybody sitting through Eastenders in the 1990s will recall that the dastardly Mitchell brothers’ most terrible schemes were always plotted over a pint and a frame or two down the snooker hall.

This association between snooker and dodgy characters is a tough one to shift. Even more so after recent events.

Jamie Burnett’s 9-3 defeat to practise partner Stephen Maguire in the UK Championship in Telford last week attracted massive media attention.

Big money was placed on such a scoreline prior to the match, with huge alarm bells ringing at various bookmakers’ as a result. Irish firm Paddy Power suspended the market having taken on some weighty punts and stand to pay out £20,000 should they honour the bets placed.

Nobody has yet presented themselves to enquire about picking up their winnings, with the company describing this as “strange”. Just a bit.

As the man defeated, Burnett’s role in the match has come under heavy scrutiny with a couple of unusual incidents — such as self-declaring a foul on brushing past a ball and massively over-cutting a decisive black which would have given him a fourth frame — pricking the curiosity of thousands of YouTube viewers.

The WPBSA are now set to investigate, presumably once it has got to the bottom of a similar but less high-profile case. In losing 5-0 to qualifier Liang Wenbo in the Northern Ireland Trophy in August, Peter Ebdon’s role in the match came under suspicion.

Ebdon is the only player on the WPBSA board and Wenbo is from China — a territory that a sport struggling for cash must get stuck into.

As it stands, it is easy to see why players outside of the game’s top echelons would be at least tempted to indulge in betting skulduggery.

Many of them have to take part-time jobs in order to make ends meet. Rory McLeod, for example, has been a mid-to-lower ranked professional for 17 years now, making plenty of televised appearances on the way. In a career spent entirely outside the world’s top 32, he has earned total prize money that just tops £100,000. McLeod now coaches the Qatar national team part-time.

Snooker is stuck in a vicious cycle and could clearly do with the sort of rebranding that has worked so successfully in recent years with darts.

For that to happen, perhaps it needs more forthright leadership than can be provided by current WPBSA chairman Sir Rodney Walker — whose annual £123,206 salary would put him eighth on snooker’s money list.

mattchambers@oldham-chronicle.co.uk