Old School vs Modern Snooker

Do you consider yourself a conservative Snooker fan? You might do after reading this.

It's normal to get people debating on which era of Snooker had the better players, and it's normal to see people that lived the 80's or the 90's saying Snooker was better back then.
Well, firstly I want to make it clear that here I'll be talking about Snooker from the 80's onwards, so "Modern Snooker" means nowadays Snooker and "Old School" means 80's, 90's and maybe 2000's Snooker.

I've said here in the Blog that I think Steve Davis is the biggest name in the history of Snooker, because he changed the way it is played and helped to make it as famous as it is today. Alongside Steve Davis, the 80's had Alex Higgins, Terry Griffths, Cliff Thorburn and Dennis Taylor being very successful. The 80's marked the first decade of "modern era" in Snooker.
With a new way to build breaks, Stephen Hendry took charge of Snooker in 90's and dominated Snooker as no had ever done in the modern era, and so far no one have ever matched that. But in fact the overall standard didn't seem to improve in the 90's, Jimmy White was far away from being as good as Hendry but he was still comfortably the second best player in the World playing a style of Snooker that was played in the 80's. Below Hendry and White, the other players could only battle for third place. John Parrott was the only player apart from Hendry and White to reach the World Championship final in 5 years!
Hendry's success made him inspire a new generation of players, but Hendry in fact had many weaknesses in his game, he was the sort of player that will win the frame if you make a mistake, but he needs your mistake, he wasn't going to make things happen in the safety battles or scrappy frames, neither he was going to pull out a fantstic long pot and finish from there. And players that became professionals inspired by Hendry (O`Sullivan, Williams, Higgins, Stevens, Hunter, etc) fastly fixed it and became better than him technically.
It was clear that Hendry had been overcome, after a domination of 1996 where he won the all the Triple Crown events, he didn't win any for the next two years. John Higgins had won most of them.
But Hendry wasn't a 6x World Champion for nothing, he was the best potter in the World and after some work made on his tactical game he started to play better in the safety department and won the World Championship in 1999 for a 7th time to make his dream of beating Davis' record come true.
However, it proved to be Hendry's last Triple Crown event win, and Ronnie O`Sullivan, joint by Mark Williams, started to take the game by storm. And it looked like the standard had grown massively, they were better than Hendry but they were still followed closely by John Higgins, Paul Hunter, Matthew Stevens, Peter Ebdon, Graeme Dott, and in the late 2000's you include to this list Ding Junhui, Shaun Murphy, Neil Robertson and Mark Selby.
And then, after Barry Hearn took charge of World Snooker in 2010, Snooker started an amazing work on the globalization of the sport, and the results came quickly. We've players coming from every part of the World, and the result of more people playing the game is another standard raise. The World Cup last year had 23 nations represented, all of them played some really good Snooker, including India, Norway, Brazil, Pakistan, Iraq, Belgium, Australia, etc... and the title was won by China for a second time, but this time with their "B" team, composed by players then aged 15 and 17.
Last season, a player today ranked 57 was semi-finalist of the UK Championship (losing to a non Top 16 player in the semis), a player ranked 54 won a tournament (beating a player ranked 48 in the Final), and we also had the German Masters final between two players outside the Top 16.
This season, a player today ranked 91 was quarter-finalist of a tournament, a player ranked 38 was runner-up of the Paul Hunter Classic, and we also have had a Ranking Event won by a player outside the Top 16.
Obviously, saying that's their current Ranking position means when these players achieved those results they were even worst in the Rankings.

Now I've proved that technically the actual generation is better than any past generation and if everything keeps on going normally, the future generations will be better as well. Of course there are a few exceptions of players from the 80's and 90's that if peaking today, could still be a Top 5-10, but generally nowadays Snooker is a lot better and numbers prove it, low ranked players don't get better results because the top players are worst, they do it because they're better. Most of our 3-days tournament get more centuries than long tournaments in the 80's and in the 90's and the century rate at the Crucible has never been as high.

But is Snooker bigger now or was it bigger in the 80's?
In the 80's Snooker became UK's most watched sport, and it was a mania all over the country. You'd expect it to get bigger as time goes on, but in fact after the 80's Snooker was getting a bit forgotten as time went on.
But recently, with the work Barry Hearn and Jason Ferguson (WPBSA Chairman) have been doing, the game is getting popular world-widely and with the advance in technology Snooker has now been watched by a lot more people, it's not exclusively a British sport anymore. Just last season Snooker reached 1,5 Billion people around the globe. It's fair to say that current famous players (O`Sullivan, Ding, Trump, etc...)  are more famous than Davis or Hendry were at their time.
Some of the countries that have held Snooker tournaments in the past few years include: Brazil, Netherlands, Poland, Latvia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Australia, Thailand, India, etc... Fair to say as well that this season the tour will be going for Romania for the first time ever for the European Masters.

But is nowadays Snooker better than in the past?
Not necessarily. Everybody live their own time and most people tend to prefer the Snooker they grew up watching and be nostalgic about it, and they're not wrong. That's not a matter of quality, but preference and it's up to you deciding which you like the most.

Which opinions you cannot have?
Well I started the post saying that after reading this you'd might change your opinion and consider yourself a consevative Snooker fan, well if you thought the 80's or the 90's Snooker was technically better than nowadays' Snooker and you still think it, you are conservative because I've proven with numbers that today's Snooker has a better quality, don't matter if you think it's more enjoyable or not.
You cannot also think that any mid-ranked player nowadays shoud've been successful in the 80's or the players from back then shouldn't have been successful in nowadays' Snooker. Firstly current Snooker players have a technique that evolved over the years, if they were peaking at the 80's they probably wouldn't be as good. And even having an "outdated technique", Steve Davis - for example - would still give Ronnie O`Sullivan and co. a run for their money because he was simply perfect at what he did. Beating O`Sullivan himself in the final of the 1997 Masters is a proof of it; he wasn't better, but he wouldn't be far away.



Thanks everyone for reading, and an special thanks to Ronnie O`Sullivan and Chris Hood for their mention of the Blog last thursday live on Phoneix FM (hear it here from 7:55min).
Ronnie will be in action at the Shanghai Masters, right after the World 6Reds Championship. You can follow all results and news via Ronnie O`Sullivan Brasil on Facebook.