By Elliott West
“We are living through tough times, constantly facing the challenges of travel and commercial restrictions on a global scale. Our sport has coped much better than most over the past 18 months and we continue to strive to provide the best possible calendar of events for our players and fans. Despite postponing Turkey, we have a packed schedule for most of the season, while our worldwide linear and digital audiences continue to grow.”
Steve Dawson, Chairman of the World Snooker Tour.
Introduction
The new snooker season has got off to a really good start with the staging of the highly successful Championship League and the recently revived British Open. However now snooker fans are being starved of any tournaments until October due to the postponement of a new addition to the snooker calendar, the Turkish Masters, that was due to be held in September. However, the pandemic has caused Turkey to become a red zone country and deadly wildfires in the country, led World Snooker to make the difficult decision to delay the start of the new event until March 2022. A decision that new World Snooker Tour chairman Steve Dawson admitted was a “huge disappointment”.
Plugging the Gap
WST has tried to alleviate this calendar headache by moving the English Open and Scottish Open qualifiers forward to fill this space in September and the Northern Ireland Open qualifiers currently being played at the Morningside Arena in Leicester. This will mean the next live tournament will not be scheduled to be played until the 9th of October when the Northern Ireland Open begins at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast.
World Snooker did make a comment that they were aiming to hold a replacement tournament in Barnsley during this period to compensate snooker fans but to date, this hasn’t materialised. Of course, you could sign up to some betting site and watch a livestream of a qualifier but no disrespect to those that have to play to in qualifiers but for the viewer, it is as dull as dishwater and is not helped by the poor graphics that WST use on their website to publish the live scores.
I understand that this has been an extremely difficult period of time for all sports including snooker and snooker has done extremely well to stage the majority of its snooker calendar to date. Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to the Turkish fans to hold this new tournament on British soil for its first outing as the German Masters was last season in Milton Keynes. However, there must be a solution to this problem because I am loathed to having to trail through old snooker footage until October to alleviate my snooker fix. Perhaps more of a whinge than criticism but definitely one that needs to be addressed in the near future. A gap that won’t occur in next season’s calendar as we come out of the worst of this pandemic.
