2016/17 Season Review

The time has come for one of - if not - the most popular features here in the Blog, so without "bla bla bla" let's look back at the principal points of the 2016/17 Snooker season:

Robertson's Poor Season

Who would've thought that after having a section called "Robertson Domination" here in last season's review I'd be here today talking about a very disappointing season from the Australian? Well the odds were even shorter when he started the season flying: He won the first tournament of the season in Latvia and made the semis of the second event he played, only losing to a nearly 'ROSB Award winning' performance from Joe Perry in China. However, after that the 2010 World Champion never reached another Final, with a 0-6 defeat in his only other semi-final appearance.
Robertson, who had won or at least made a Final of a Triple Crown event every season prior to this since 2011/12, didn't even qualify to the TV stages losing in the first Round of his UK Championship title defence, and couldn't get past Round 2 in the other two Triple Crown events.

O`Sullivan's Finals
As he's said before, Ronnie O`Sullivan believes "a player must play at least 80% of the season if he wants to win the World Championship". That probably made him start the season earlier than he usually does (even though that was only in September, when most players had already played quite a few events). It wasn't a bad season, but having so many fans made his three Final defeats sound like a disaster before he finally won The Masters for a record 7th time. The win meant Ronnie has won a Triple Crown event in each of the last 6 seasons - longest current run.

Trump's Finals
Judd Trump impressed so much this season that many had him as favourite for the World Championship before a Round 1 defeat in the hands of the World No54. However, Trump also had to cope with painful consecutive Final defeats - after beating Ronnie O`Sullivan to win the European Masters, the Englishman lost three consecutively before finally winning the Players Championship.
However, a Last 64 defeat in the UK Championship and first Round exits at The Masters and the Crucible kept Trump's Triple Crown record pretty below expectations, principally after he'd said he was playing up to "a rare standard for nowadays" coming onto the World Championship.

Shoot-Out, a Success or a Fail?
In the 2016/17 Season Preview, I reacted to World Snooker's decision to make the Shoot-Out a Ranking Event. I disagreed for various reasons, but now we've seen it happen, was it good or bad?
Like I've said before, I love the Shoot-Out and I think it brings a lot of new fans into the sport, so that it's fantastic to have it on free-to-air television and there's space for more events like this in Snooker. But this year's event proved that I'm right in saying that a tournament of such format should never be a Ranking Event. In fact, the Shoot-Out was very controversial and it put Snooker in many headlines, but was it worth it? Fans will usually agree with their favourite players and the vast majority of the top players decided to miss the event (boycott in Neal Foulds' words). So the reaction wasn't positive from the players, and neither from the regular Snooker fans.
What did Barry Hearn do? Being the great marketman he is, he put all 128 players to vote whether they'd like to keep the Shoot-Out as a Ranking Event or scratch it off the calendar. With most of the 128 obviously being non-top players, in the danger of cutting off a chance to appear on TV and earn some money, they voted for the Shoot-Out to keep as it is. That's what I'd vote, but only because there wasn't the option to vote for it being an invitational non-ranking tournament - I don't think the controverses around it are exactly good for the sport's repute.

Season without PTCs, and new Home Nations Series
The European Tours (or PTCs as many people knew them) were extinguished this season. I must admit it felt a bit odd not having them but it was a big step forward for Snooker, as the countries that used to receive them now staged much bigger and prestigious "major Ranking Events" like World Snooker called them.
Another good addition this season was the Home Nations series. I loved it, but one thing I'd change is putting a Order of Merit list into it with the final leader to earn some bonus of £200k or something like that, keeping the £1m up for grabs in case someone wins all four. I say that because once Liang Wenbo won the English Open several top players lost the interest in the series.
I also can't understand why such bonus wouldn't count for the Rankings, everyone has a chance and to be fair you can't touch the World Number One these days unless you've won one of the previous two World Championships. But let's not criticise something that worked!

Stream Issues and Redemption at the World Championship
Last year, after hearing World Snooker had a new 10-year deal with Eurosport, I was over the moon. However this season made me understand why sporting associations usually make one-year deals with television channels.
The new contract with proved to be a nightmare to fans. Eurosport been great to Snooker and helped massively in the recent growth of the sport, but they can't just buy and boss it.

Having the might over the broadcast of all Snooker events, many countries had to watch some online as Eurosport cut them off the TV (particularly in the start of the season, under the fans' rebellion). But that wasn't the worst part. After all the hard work World Snooker has done to successfully make the game grow worldwide, they simply sold the rights of ALL events to Eurosport and unless you are in China or Europe, you've been blocked to watch any Snooker this season - such a sad thing to happen when things are going ever so well.
Whoever follows this Blog throughout the season saw that I had non-stop contacts with World Snooker asking for a solution on this, but apparently they had less power than Eurosport in terms of event's rights. However, I like to think that I (and everyone who kept asking them) had some influence on their decision to broadcast the World Championship 2017 live on Facebook for people outside Europe and China for free. It will not recover what they lost throughout the whole season when we couldn't watch it even if we wished to pay for it, but I hope it has reminded World Snooker the value of streaming the game outside Europe.

Dominant Selby wins at the Crucible
On the table, the 2016/17 season was all Selby's. Winning five of the main Ranking Tournaments he equalized Stephen Hendry's and Ding Junhui's record of most wins in a Snooker season.
And victory at the World Championship to finish with, makes the 2016/17 season of Mark Selby probably the best season any player has ever had (read here my opinion why), considering nowaday's tour standard. Winning the last two Ranking Tournaments of the season back-to-back (an all-time first since the China Open is played), Selby has broken the record of more money earned in a single season ever, and past the 1,2 million Ranking Points (which are based on £ earned) he has now comfortably more than twice as many points earned than World No2 John Higgins.

This is it for the 2016/17 Review, but stay tuned and like us on Facebook to be sure you come back for the 2017/18 Season Preview! 😉