Ostensibly, sport aims to answer one question: who is the best? Humans being humans, we naturally invest it with meaning beyond that – the teams we support are ours forever, a fixed part of our identity representing values and a way of life. We keep coming back because we have no choice.
Individual sports, though, are different, players necessarily transient, so what keeps us coming back is the competition itself. And for that reason, there is greater onus on it to provide a satisfying outcome: we want our world championships won by the best player in the world, and Kyren Wilson, snooker’s newly minted king – a terrific talent and worthy winner – is, on the face of it, no such thing.
This is a relatively new development. In the 1980s and 1990s, snooker was dominated first by Steve Davis then by Stephen Hendry, while darts had Eric Bristow and Phil Taylor. Fans tuned in to marvel at their epochal brilliance – likewise Tiger Woods in golf, Serena Williams in tennis and so on – but also to watch if someone could beat them, secure in the knowledge that if anyone did it was big news, and if no one did they received the certainty they were seeking. It was clean, it was compelling and it was absolute; it meant something.
Since then, things have changed. In those early days, the most successful darts and snooker players had a secret weapon: hard work. Now, though, the hidden benefits of putting in effort are well known, the rewards and organisation such that increasing numbers of youngsters are doing so from an early age. Consequently, there are many more amazing players knocking about than ever before: in the past decade, men’s snooker and men’s darts have seen seven different world champions, the title generally won by whoever happens to play best over the duration of the tournament – or, more accurately, in its closing stages. Though the standard is stratospheric, the competition can no longer be regarded as definitive.
Barry Hearn, the power behind both sports, understands very well that ambivalence is a killer. As a boxing promoter, he helped turn Chris Eubank into more than a fighter, just as, when he began managing snooker players, he established them not only as media personalities but distinct characters, seeking to build a stable of varied personalities with everyone able to find someone in whom they could invest.
The darts explosion also shows evidence of this plan. Raymond van Barneveld, say, is presented as a suggestible, agreeable cartoon presence thanks to his Barney Rubble-based nickname, and though this characterisation is not necessarily proximate to the truth, it has helped both men make a lot of money by creating interest beyond the basic winning and losing of darts matches.
So we know Wilson’s story – most recently, his wife and one of his sons have struggled with ill health, but also his parents have made sacrifices to get him to this point and he really really loves snooker. As such, when he won, we were moved because we knew he had dedicated his life to reaching this point and understood why, as he served the final dish, he was crying even before the BBC’s Hazel Irvine could make sure. But we also knew that, before the worlds, his season included only two quarter-finals and one semi, and his last ranking title had come in August 2022, one of only three won across his career.
In the meantime Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump cashed in, the former taking the two remaining triple crown events, the UK Championships and the Masters, and the latter equalling the ranking-tournament record of five. But at the Crucible both were eliminated – comfortably in the end – in the last eight, while Mark Allen, the new world No 1, departed a round earlier.
The experiences of these players are key to understanding snooker’s current situation. O’Sullivan’s genius is such that, if he plays well, he wins in almost every circumstance, but Trump has claimed only one world title, producing one of the greatest performances in any sport to defeat John Higgins in 2019; since then he has taken 17 further ranking titles, eight more than the next best, yet reached only one Crucible final, while Allen has snared eight in that time but made only one world semi and otherwise departed in the early stages.
These fluctuating fortunes reflect something else Hearn understands very well: that in an individual sport, where fans do not watch as a matter of duty and routine, competitions must be distinctive and exciting. So the Champion of Champions, say, features group matches and group final followed by semis and a final, over varying distances, while the UK Championship is a straight knockout with every round a race to six, save the final, which is a race to 10.
And if we look at the competitions in which Trump tends to succeed, we can see a pattern – he is devastating over best-of-seven frames, but over the longer world-championship format, his technical weaknesses tend to defeat his recovery-potting. Allen, meanwhile, still struggles to balance his natural attacking game with the safety play required to win matches of three or more sessions, and until he finds that equilibrium he will struggle to last the distance in Sheffield.
Wilson, on the other hand, has made the last four in four of his past seven Crucible visits, losing one final before winning Sunday’s. Which is to say that, just as there is a pattern in Trump and Allen’s failures, so is there in his success: his single-ball potting is excellent, his snooker brain outstanding, his cue-ball control improved and his temperament near-perfect. He did not aspire to win the big one at some point during his career, he believed it was his destiny.
So, though the world championships are no longer a reliable barometer for determining our leading light, because they are designed to examine every aspect of a player – tactical, technical and mental – this year, we can comfortably conclude that, after winning five matches by margins of nine, seven, five, six and four frames, we got what we came for. Kyren Wilson is world champion because, over the stretch, Kyren Wilson is the best player in the world.
