Former Snooker World Championship winner Stuart Bingham was a guest at Sky Sports to chat with media personality Raz Mirza about his love for snooker, his unique memories at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, and why he considers Ronnie O'Sullivan to be the best snooker athlete.
The World Snooker Championships have been home to the Crucible Theatre for 43 years, and the "outage" of sporting events around the world threatens for the first time the most prestigious snooker event. The World Championships were originally scheduled to be held from April 18 to May 4, but due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Barry Hearn, president of the World Snooker Tour (WST), announced that it would be postponed to July or August.
When the stormy championships arrive, Bingham will continue to be a potential champion and join the 17-day battle. Although Bingham has made a career, he is not a man without feelings, and he worries that modern snooker is gradually erasing the heavy sense of history.
Remember snooker's glory in the 1980s? Remember the Black Ball Showdown in the final of the 1985 World Championships? A group of snooker maniacs who sang "Snooker Maniacs" propelled the sport to the top, and 18.5 million people in the UK watched the black ball showdown between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor on television...
Bingham said: "The atmosphere of Crucible, when I was a child as a spectator, I experienced it as a player, and no other atmosphere in the arena could be better than this, and Crucible has its own unique place." In our sport, a lot of people forget about history, and when you look at other sports, they pay a lot of attention to history, and snooker is a little bit less interesting in this regard. ”
"Now when you talk to people, you find a lot of people who don't know who Steve Davis is, only Ronnie O'Sullivan or Judd Trump, or the game they're watching right now, and they don't know the history at all. It's sad, as a spectator who watched 35 to 40 years of ball and a player who played 30 years of ball, I feel sorry for it. Snooker also has a rich history, and Sheffield is one of the most important chapters. ”
Bingham, 43, beat Ali Carter 10-8 at Alexandria Palace in London earlier this year to win the Masters, his second title in the "Three Races" after he won the World Championship in 2015. "I think age is just a number, I only started playing snooker at the age of 14, it was a very late start, and now more and more young talents are playing out, but the status of the older generation is still difficult to shake."
Speaking about his experience in winning the Masters, he said: "I remember a lot of seeded players who were out, which made my signing table a lot more comfortable, and I grabbed every key moment to win another title for myself. ”
Bingham is still moved by the world championship final five years ago, when he beat Sean Murphy 18-15 in an epic final. He said: "Looking back at that year when I won a few championships before the World Championships and reached the semi-finals several times, I was in very sharp form, and Lady Luck was on my side again, and everything went smoothly. ”
"Before that World Championship, I was only in the quarter-finals at Crucible. The feeling of going through a single table in Crucible was really fantastic, it was unbelievable, and at some point in the final I thought I was done, when Murphy was 15-12 ahead and I chased it to 15 draws, but thought it was over, and somehow I won three games in a row and lifted the coveted championship trophy. ”
He has played many times with Stephen Hendry and Ronnie O'Sullivan, and only some of the senior players today have this experience. Bingham, one of them, believes that the "Rocket" O'Sullivan is far superior to others, strong enough to be classified as an "alien".
"Ronnie has done it for the last 30 years, and although he's picky, he's still playing, he's still at the top of the line and he can make you feel the difference between the two sides clearly." Bingham said, "There's no doubt I think Ronnie is the best player I've ever played against, he's the only player of his time to have the aura of kings, Steve Davis was once shrouded in that aura, then Stephen Hendry, and now Ronnie. ”
"It's your ball right now, but as long as it's Ronnie in the opponent's seat, you're afraid of making a mistake, you're going to be afraid of giving him a simple chance, because you know very well that once you give it away, he's going to clear the table and win."