By Elliott West
“We are looking forward to being a part of Riyadh Season on this fantastic new event featuring the world’s best players. We will be honoured to bring our sport to the amazing city of Riyadh, and for the local fans this will be their first chance to see some of snooker’s all-time greats.”
Steve Dawson
Introduction
I am not very often scathing about a sport that I have loved since the age of 14. Barry Hearn left a legacy of making snooker a global sport and despite attempts to grow the game in Bahrain, Gibraltar and Turkey, all were shoved in the recycling bin. One of the last tournaments that Hearn signed off was a £2.5 million deal to create the Saudi Arabian Masters, a ten-year deal with a first prize of £500,000. This deal went up in smoke, enveloped by the Covid pandemic and forgotten in the blink of an eye.
Now a media release has come out from World Snooker that there is to be a new addition to the tour this season with the announcement of The Ryadh World Season Of Snooker, made up of eight players including Luca Brecel, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Judd Trump and two wildcards. There will be a $1 million prize fund for this event staged between March 4-7 at the Boulevard Arena and an additional gold ball that allows a 167 break to be made.
“I think we are seeing snooker in new territories now with exhibitions popping up in different places and it’s amazing that Saudi Arabia wants to get involved.”
Eddie Hearn
A Gimmick
I have never been a fan of Razmataz and support The Snooker Shootout with gritted teeth. A tournament that is more pub fun than snooker. However, it does help lower-ranking players, including all 128 players with ranking points and boosts their confidence on the tour if they win. So I commend it for those reasons. We all know that there is a desire amongst the top players to earn more money through lucrative exhibitions and an example of this was the so-called exhibitions in Macau and Tibet over the Christmas period. This caused a spat between WST and Ronnie O’Sullivan and company with a breach of the rule book. One that ended when a compromise was made.
So I may be cynical but this new Saudi event seems to be a way of keeping these players on side and more splinter events occurring outside the tour. I am not comfortable with snooker going to a country who are one of the worst abusers of human rights especially when the other 120 players are excluded from the event. This is an obvious example of something dreamt up where money talks. Barry Hearn tried to glitz up snooker with flashing lights and walk-on girls and there have several attempts to create hybrids of snooker with Power Snooker and television programmes like Time Frame and Tenball failing to hit the mark. The only one excluding The Snooker Shootout is Six Reds which is highly popular in China and Thailand.
Give it a Chance
Some say that this Saudi event could lead to a larger tournament being introduced here soon. That may be the case but I am sure that fans and players would have rather have seen this happen first. Instead, we have a typical Hearn-style event, the Eddie and Barry show. This is not darts or boxing, it’s snooker. The golden ball will probably be forgotten as quickly as the orange and purple balls at the 1959 News of the World Snooker Plus Tournament. However, this is the golden carrot for those players that go there. It comes with a very large pay cheque that they wouldn’t see on the tour and promotes a country that loves a media headline. This golden Ryadh Season ball may be worth 20 points on the table but is far more lucrative off it. It will make someone’s bank very happy and destroy the spirit of snooker.
Other Horizons
I would much rather WST look at bringing a tournament to somewhere like Dubai. The home of the Dubai Classic for many years and somewhere that is far more liberal than Saudi Arabia. Not to say that it doesn’t betray the realms of democracy. The UAE is a far better place for this to occur. I know it didn’t work in Bahrain but Dubai and the capital Abu Dhabi are a different ball game. Both are crying out for investment in players and snooker clubs and a 64/128 player tournament would be a real boost. Scrap these gimmick events and put the money into a hopefully long-standing tournament. Through that money trickles into growing snooker in the Middle East and finding players from this region who turn professional in the future.
