10th ANNIVERSARY!

Today is the 10th anniversary of "Down the Rail"!

This year, when my dream came true to attend the World Championship at the Crucible for the first time, having the blog made it be than I could've wished for. It was an enhanced experience to be given a media pass and interview all the players, as well as having access to all the backstage action and meet people that I've corresponded online with for a long time now. 

The blog has now hit +100,000 page views, with the recent "Crucible Blog" becoming the most read post ever on the website. In fact, the 2022 World Championship was, viewing figure-wise, the most successful time in the blog's history - now four of my five most read posts ever are blogs related to this year's World Championship. But to reach this "relevance" with the blog within the snooker community is quite unbelievable, especially when I look back at how it all started...

Cue-sports are very popular in Brazil but by 2008, when I first entered a snooker room, I had never had any interest into playing. Snooker was love at first sight, though. I was nine years-old and I was fascinated by the sport - individual sports have always been my preference, and the tactical side of snooker made me instantly want to play and learn about the game more and more.

A few months later, when people around the club noticed that I had some aptitude for the game, I remember this guy writing a few names on a paper and handing to me saying I should check them on YouTube, since I had no idea who they were. Amongst a few other names, Ronnie O'Sullivan and John Higgins was written on it.

I remember spending the night that day watching them in shock. I didn't know anything about the main tour, let alone that there were actual players that could score +100 points breaks. For someone living in the UK it's hard to have that perspective, but at the time you could go to regional competitions in Brazil and the majority of the contestants would know nothing about the world snooker tour. 

But I had fallen in love with it so much that I couldn't stop looking it up on YouTube, and soon I got interested in watching the tournaments as they happened - a very difficult thing to do since there was not a single Portuguese-BR source to get information from and I couldn't speak English. I then found two pages: the world snooker website and the snooker window on BBC's website, and I would look them up on Google Translate daily to get informed.

I was following results and watching the matches as soon as they got uploaded to YouTube, but it wasn't until 2011, when I joined Twitter and the snooker community helped me, that I started watching matches live through online livestreams.

Then, on October 4th, 2012 I created the Facebook Page. It was called "Ronnie O'Sullivan Brasil" - I had already enjoyed watching him on YouTube, but when he won the 2012 World Championship (after I thought his best days were behind him) Ronnie became my favourite player. The page was the first source of snooker news in Portuguese-BR language, and the aim was to make the world snooker tour popular in Brazil - posts were mainly results and prize money information.

On August 2013, I got in touch with Ronnie O'Sullivan himself on Twitter. I told him about the page, and he thanked me for the support, later saying it was OK to use his name. That was the first time I had been in touch with Ronnie. Later, we've been in touch another few times, including when I featured - a few times - in a weekly show he presented on Phoenix FM. He treated me as a good friend and that's where I became a fan of his person - it was great to meet him at the Crucible this year and be able to interview him.

The page had been going well (+4,000 followers), my attempt at becoming a main tour player someday was progressing (although that goal wasn't ultimately achieved, I won four consecutive State Championships from 2012 to 2015 in SP - Brazil), so in December 2013, when I had gained some confidence in my English writing, I created the blog to write mainly opinions, in English (the page continued with Portuguese-BR content).

I don't know what it was, but somehow some people seemed to like what I had been writing. I'm very proud to have reached people with my writing being always honest with my opinions (some may have changed, but I've never made anything up for whatever reason), and based on my knowledge of the game (in continuous growth always).

On June 2014, I made the first interview for the blog. The interviewed was Dylan Craig, the then European U-18 Champion, who had also won every junior division of the Scottish Championship. 

My interviewing skills have, thankfully, improved a lot since then. On April 2015 I interviewed WPBSA Chairman Jason Ferguson. I couldn't even have an idea at the time of how huge it was for a 16 years-old, some 5,000 miles away from England, to interview the president of the sport's global association. Back then Jason said to me "keep blogging, we need people like you to spread the word of our wonderful sport", and to this day I still save those words with me. Later, with exclusive insight from Mr. Ferguson himself, we also covered two huge moments in the history of snooker: the Olympic bid in 2015, 2016 and 2017, and the WPBSA/IBSF split in 2017.

Amongst other names I've been able to interview over these 10 years there are Ronnie O'Sullivan, Mark Williams, Kyren Wilson, Neil Robertson, Matthew Stevens, Kurt Maflin, Mark Selby, David Gilbert.

On August 2020, "Ronnie O'Sullivan Brasil" was rebranded into "Down the Rail". The link will take you to the Blog I wrote at the time, but to summarize it, I had not been having enough time to feed the page with daily news, so I decided to focus on the Blog and turned the page into English content as well - therefore, the rebrand.

I feel very proud having achieved the initial goal, though - the main tour is now very popular around the local snooker scene. Where I was once the first, there are now many pages sharing snooker content in PT-BR language, and Brazilian YouTube channels with over a million subscribers that show pool content but eventually some snooker too. (On April last year I wrote about "How snooker became Brazil's second most popular sport").

Thanks for everyone who's been somehow involved in this history: readers, players, fellow bloggers, friends, and once again (I hope he doesn't get used to it 😂) a special mention to my friend Chris Varney, who's helped the blog writing texts and providing content source with his collected memorabilia. 

I love snooker and I love being part of this family, long may the blog continue! Thanks for reading 😄

My social medias:

Facebook: /DownTheRail 

Instagram: @downtherail

Twitter: @IgorSnooker147