The spot put on 4 Chinese snooker players on the last World Championship illuminates the uncommonness of the presence of non-British players at the sports’ most significant event. Seriously, over the last 30 years most of the World Snooker Championship emerged of the British Isles. So, who is to blame? The governing body’s poor global promoting efforts? The United Kingdom’s pride in its snooker heroes? Or is it the weather? 

"Calling the championships at the Crucible the World Championships is a joke considering only about six countries are represented in the top 50 of the World rankings. It’s like America calling their baseball final the World Series." 

Says a snooker fan nicknamed Foliage at the BBC’s comments page, and suggests a conspiracy theory according to which the (UK based) snooker authorities who are afraid to lose the country’s dominance on the game’s talents are making zero efforts to promote snooker abroad.

One of the commenters suggested something else:

"You do need to look at climate to see why more players come from cold wet countries. Scotland is not renown for it’s tropical sunny temperatures, so when the likes of Hendry and Higgins wanted to kill some time they went indoors to the snooker room. In Brazil you go out and kick a ball round." 

In other words, blame the English rain.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 6:25 am and is filed under Snooker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.