On the wall behind the bar at Penarth Road Snooker Club, next to a shelf supporting dusty bottles of gin and Disaronno, there hangs a black-and-white photograph of a young Jimmy White. Known as the “The Whirlwind” to his fans, he cuts a svelte figure in a dress suit, an impish Artful Dodger grin on his face. The portrait is from the mid-Eighties, when snooker was one of our most watched sports, and when White, alongside the likes of Steve “Interesting” Davis and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, was genuinely a household name.
Tucked away next to a used-car dealership, on an industrial estate a few miles from Cardiff, the whole club is like this, an echo of a lost Britain. Deep within its cave-like chamber, the players resemble wraiths, forever trapped beneath the golden pools of light that illuminate each table. When I visit, Roxette’s 1987 song “It Must Have Been Love” hums from a TV overhead, perennially tuned to a channel showcasing big-haired hitmakers. The club seems to trade in yesterday’s prices too. I seize the offer of becoming a “lifetime” member for a mere £5, only to be informed that the club has run out of membership cards. Is this how it works at Soho House?
Not that I’d have it any other way. With its odd atmosphere, at once inviting and moody, Penarth Road is the kind of place I’ve been seeking out since I first stepped foot in a snooker hall some 25 years ago. Yet if it feels strange in its oldness, Penarth Road is unusual in other ways too. Over the last few decades, hundreds of clubs have closed right across the country. Cardiff alone has seen the shuttering of several over recent decades, each departure snuffing out a universe of cheap pints and the baize.
It speaks, if nothing else, to the deep questions floating around snooker’s future. How can the game flourish, in this country anyway, if there are fewer places to practice and play? Why would youngsters even want to master this maddening old game, seemingly stuck in the past and played by middle-aged men? And yet, in the Far East, potting balls is increasingly seen as young and cool. It all suggests a sport at the precipice of change, as this quintessential parlour game forsakes its English roots — and globalises alongside everything else.
On the face of it, snooker is in good shape. Over recent years, the professional tour has seen an increase in tournaments and prize money. Ticket sales are strong: the World Championships and Masters are often sell-outs, with punters eagerly handing upwards of £50 to enjoy the privilege of watching a ludicrously difficult game made to look easy.
Snooker’s global audience has also skyrocketed. That is partly down to growing interest in Europe, following the victory of Belgium’s Luca Brecel in the 2022 World Championships. China, too, is increasingly attracted to the game, with the People’s Republic hosting as many as 60 million active players. The World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association (WPBSA), the game’s governing body, reckons the World Snooker Championship, set to start in Sheffield tomorrow, could attract a global televised audience of 500 million people.
This hardly suggests a sport on its knees, as snooker truly was some years back, when the end of tobacco sponsorship saw the number of ranking tournaments dwindle to just six. Some consider the intervention of Barry Hearn, with the promoter taking control of the tour in 2010, as the moment snooker was coaxed back from the abyss. “Snooker is no longer a UK-based sport,” says Jason Ferguson, the WPBSA chairman. “It’s a truly global sport.”
It’s perhaps unfair to gauge snooker’s success through this country alone. But for all the talk of the game’s global standing, the only other places outside the UK to host professional tournaments this season have been China, Hong Kong, Germany and Saudi Arabia. In other words, then, the sport seems popular merely in pockets, rather than being a genuinely international phenomenon.
At one point during our chat, Ferguson, himself an ex-professional, tellingly refers to snooker as a UK “export”. “There’s something still quintessentially English about the game,” he says, “be that the dress code or its history.”
It’s a reasonable point. From the bow ties and waistcoats to the emphasis on sportsmanship — players are obliged to admit to fouls even if the referee doesn’t notice — snooker still brands itself on its British roots. But what if those roots are withering? According to one estimate, Britain hosted around 650 clubs in 2019. That pales compared to the thousands that sprung up in the Eighties, when it wasn’t unusual to find three or four in any mid-sized town. Much like pubs, many went out of business after the smoking ban arrived in 2007, while others were gobbled up by developers eager for slabs of prime real estate.
Ferguson says the rate of closures has since stabilised, while implying that the market may have been oversaturated anyway. Perhaps. But beyond the raw numbers, another way of understanding British snooker’s health is by going to places like Penarth Road — and here, the prognosis feels grim.
The punters when I visit are mostly men, with few appearing under 40. One, sporting a large grey beard and wearing an old Cardiff City top, swears as an attempt at a long red misses the pocket by a proverbial country mile. He looks admonishingly at his cue and grouses to his playing partner. “I might as well be playing with a bloody boomerang,” he laments, his South Welsh drawl hanging thick about my ears.
It didn’t used to be like this. Back in the Eighties, snooker was part of the national conversation. Its cast of colourful personalities — from hellraisers like White to housewives’ favourite Cliff “The Grinder” Thorburn — were chat-show regulars. On Fleet Street, each national paper had its own in-house snooker correspondent. A miniature snooker table was the Christmas present to have for any self-respecting child. As Chas ‘n’ Dave sang it in 1986, we were all “snooker loopy”.
While it’s true that snooker’s boom period was helped by there being only four television channels, meaning most households had little choice but to watch, it arguably tapped into the era’s political zeitgeist. As Dominic Sandbrook notes in his history of Eighties Britain, this individual sport, played by working class men dressed as gentlemen, chimed with the aspirationalist promise of Thatcherism.
How, then, to explain snooker’s apparent decline since those heady days? One answer, surely, is that there are now far more distractions. Its slow and gentle rhythm puts it instantly at odds with the mores of modern society. While fans savour the ebbs and flows of the World Championship final, the idea of a sporting contest taking two days feels increasingly ridiculous.
“Snooker’s slow and gentle rhythm puts it immediately at odds with the mores of modern society.”
Then there are the multiple demands of being an aspiring professional in today’s game. The long hours of practice. The costs of travelling up and down the motorway to qualifying events. The cheap hotels. The solitude. Ben Harrison, a talented former English amateur champion, abandoned the sport in 2016 because of the strain. “It just all became too much in the end,” he tells me. Harrison now leads a much happier life as a married man and estate agent in his hometown of Trowbridge. “I have no regrets.”
But snooker’s authorities are not giving up bringing young people into the game. This includes projecting a healthier image of clubs, moving away from their erstwhile reputation as smoke-filled dens of iniquity, frequented by truants, gamblers and chancers.
Yet if it’s true that many of these new venues offer better facilities, others feel more like sports bars than snooker clubs, rigged out with bright lights and big screens, where American pool tables outnumber their larger, green-baized counterparts. They don’t immediately lend themselves to the atmosphere required to play a game so demanding in concentration that Australian wit Clive James once described it as “chess with balls”.
Not that everywhere seems to take snooker so casually. For if Penarth Road Snooker Club symbolises the game’s past, and those shiny bar-and-grill joints seem only tangentially interested in the sport, then Victoria’s Snooker Academy in Sheffield might offer a glimpse into its future.
Located in a converted modern office space, on a quiet street next to the city centre — not far from the Crucible, hallowed home of the World Championships — you could easily miss the place but for an A4-sized notice Blu-Tacked to the door: “KNOCK HERE FOR SNOOKER”.
The club is silent, save for the drone of an air-conditioning unit and the purr of a fridge stocked with tubs of Asian ice cream. The wall above the door is emblazoned with a flurry of motivational buzzwords: “Creativity”; “Ambition”; “Belief”. The players, for their part, wear earbuds as they go about various practice drills in metronomic fashion on the professional-grade Star tables, as pristine as country lawns. It’s all a long way from Penarth Road: some of the tables at my old club don’t seem to have been reclothed since before Welsh devolution.
While technically open to the public, anyway, the Academy is very much a place of work. Andrew Bromley, who runs the club with his Chinese wife Victoria Shi, doesn’t seem overly bothered when I mention it’s listed as “permanently closed” on Google. “We don’t really want people coming in off the street with cans of lager and disturbing our players,” he whispers as he shows me around. “This is a professional environment.”
Fair enough: several members of the Academy’s stable have made it to ranking event finals over the past few seasons. That includes the 22-year-old Si Juahui, and the 21-year-old Wu Yize, even as Zhao Xintong captured 2022’s UK Championship at the tender age of 25.
As the names imply, Victoria has become a haven for Chinese players especially, talented young professionals who’ve come to chase their dreams. They’re far from alone — for if snooker has become popular viewing in Beijing and Chengdu, Shanghai alone may have some 1,500 clubs.
China’s fascination with snooker can be traced back to the Eighties, when Barry Hearn organised exhibition tours in Hong Kong, then still a British territory, with the hope of growing the game in Asia. But it wasn’t until an 18-year-old Ding Junhui captured the China Open in 2005 that snooker truly took off on the mainland. Ding’s success turned him into a national hero overnight, and thrust the sport into the public consciousness. Ever the shrewd businessman, Hearn’s first act upon his 2010 return to the sport was to increase the number of tournaments in China.
While there is no evidence of strategic investment in snooker on the part of China’s government, local officials have set up snooker academies. The game is also on the sporting curriculum in schools. There are even so-called snooker colleges, such as International Billiards Academy in Yushan, in which students are taught the art of the baize alongside vocational subjects.
Little wonder, then, that former world champion Stephen Hendry recently predicted that up to eight of the game’s Top 16 players, considered snooker’s elite, may hail from China in the next decade. That’s even as the People’s Republic new stars are feted as heroes in their homelands, with Bromley describing how Academy alumni “can’t walk down the street” without being recognised.
It’s again hard not to make the international comparison. Apart from Ronnie O’Sullivan — arguably the most gifted player ever to pick up a cue, and charismatic enough to have been profiled in the New Yorker — it’s tough to think of any British snooker player the public could spot in a lineup.
But O’Sullivan, who turns 50 this year, can’t go on forever. Neither can his longtime peers Mark Williams and John Higgins — collectively known as the “Class of ’92” after the year they turned professional. At 35, world number one Judd Trump is still the closest this country has to a cue-toting wunderkind, while the reigning world champion Kyren Wilson is 33.
“Snooker could definitely do with a Luke Littler moment,” says Nick Metcalfe, host of the Talking Snooker podcast, alluding to the impact the teenager has had on darts since winning the world title earlier this year. “While we appreciate the magic of the older guys, seeing them in the big finals time after time is not necessarily a great sign.”
Neither, perhaps, is snooker’s tendency to revere its past. That nostalgia is sure to be on display with the imminent 40th anniversary of the 1985 “black ball final” — when 18.5 million TV viewers stayed up past midnight to watch a bespectacled Dennis Taylor beat Steve Davis to become champion of the world.
Taylor and Davis have recreated the famous match countless times over the years in exhibitions, featuring novelty wigs, oversized glasses and exaggerated finger wags. For Ferguson, “it’s a key milestone in the sport that we’ve got to milk.” But others believe the reminiscing has been done to death.
“I think this constant harking back to the Eighties is a real problem,” says Lewis Pirnie, a snooker analyst and frequent visitor to events in China. “The game has moved on and we should be championing the younger players. We have multiple event winners from China and there are still commentators who can’t pronounce their names correctly.”
Pirnie is obviously right. Every sport needs to regenerate if it wants to thrive. You might even say the state of snooker in Britain serves as a microcosm for the country at large: stuck in an endless Thatcherite hangover and in urgent need of renewal. All the while, a conveyor belt of talented young players continues to whir away in China, as the country enters an exciting new chapter.
Yet amid these bewildering geopolitical shifts, and a world where we want things faster and louder, snooker’s immutability remains part of the charm. You can tune into a tournament safe in the knowledge that the same old faces will be there — the same stalwarts as when TV had four channels and Neil Kinnock vied to be prime minister.
Visiting the Penarth Road Snooker Club is to be enveloped by the same kind of nostalgia. Who needs the world outside, with its natural light and unspeakable problems, when within the perpetual gloam there awaits the promise of cut-price lager and a black ball finish?
As I go to pay up, I’m drawn once more to that old photo of the Whirlwind, shrine-like behind the bar. “He was a real character, wasn’t he?” says one punters returning a tray of balls in an enormous splayed hand to the counter. “But then there were lots of them around back in those days.” As I step back out into the starry Welsh night, I can still hear the gentle click of balls as another synth classic strikes up.
