IS BBC NOW BAD FOR SNOOKER?

Last week we had a very unexpected but exciting climax to the UK Championship, the first Triple Crown tournament of the season. Or, as they’re also well known, “BBC tournaments”.

It was really refreshing to see two young talented and aggressive players making the final, with Zhao Xintong, 24, making his big breakthrough by beating Luca Brecel, 26, in a match of the highest quality - nothing short of what they had shown before throughout the tournament. 

However, the BBC have lost a lot of their loyal viewers over these 9 days of broadcast. 

I have always loved the BBC coverage and been thankful for their contribution to snooker, for their professional approach to broadcasting and the film features they make which are really good. It’s also where I started watching the game and being as a strong brand as they are, having them with snooker is actually important for the sport's prestige. But are they still essential to the game?

BBC’s power and audience reach is undeniable, but the world is changing and the way people watch their favourite shows and sporting events have changed too. Thankfully, snooker is not lacking interest from broadcasters right now - Eurosport does a great coverage of most events and ITV seems keen to have as much snooker as they can on their screens.

I don’t believe snooker will leave the BBC anytime soon (if contracts are kept, not until 2024 at least), but they urgently need to do something if they want people to actually still choose to watch snooker on their channel.

It was indeed surprising to see Zhao Xintong start the tournament ranked 26th in the world and go all the way, but for John Parrott to say that before that week he "hadn’t heard much of him", it’s ridiculous. You can’t be that careless about the work you have to do there, and people definitely noted this. Even to the casual fans that only watch the BBC events and might not even know Zhao themselves, the team will look silly for not knowing this. Clearly they only know the top 16 players and, although it’s their job to, they don’t care about the sport enough. 

Even at the end of a very poor broadcast from the BBC, in the post-final interview the presenter Jason Mohammad simply said to Zhao that “Steve Davis told me you beat him when you were 14… where’re have you been in the last 10 years?”. Everyone involved in the game has seen and heard a lot about Zhao’s talent, not to mention that he’s been a top 32 for a couple seasons. That was quite disrespectful to the players in my opinion.

BBC is already making changes, though. John Virgo didn’t feature in the broadcast this year (although he’s one that I liked), and neither did Hazel Irvine (I think it’s her decision, though. Which is a shame because she’s always been very knowledgeable about the game). Plus they’ve had some active players working for them, Shaun Murphy and Joe Perry for this tournament, Lisowski and Trump during the World Championship last season - and active players certainly know what’s happening around the tour.

But they really need to get rid of people who turn up thrice a year and have no clue about what’s going on around the tour. It has looked really bad from a snooker fan’s perspective to see pundits that would clearly rather be covering football instead. 

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