Peerless Ronnie reinventing the art of snooker

Ronnie o’Sullivan should be retired by now. He told me as much when we talked some years ago. He gave the age at which he would be done with snooker as 45, maximum.

it’s the eyes, you see. Snooker isn’t just about potting balls. everyone thinks they can pot, the way they think they can throw a dart. But they can’t see a shot the way o’Sullivan does.

That minute detail is the difference between staying on or being consigned to an observer’s seat while an opponent clears up. it is the precision required to escape from a snooker or make a long pot and return the white to its perfect position on the table, not just for the next shot, but for the whole break mapped out ahead.

You need a pilot’s vision for that. and o’Sullivan explained that by 45 he would no longer be able to see with the absolute clarity to compete with the best.

as a theory it wasn’t far wrong. He is 46 now. and world champion, again. For a record-equalling seventh time. But he is the oldest world champion in history. nobody has ever seen the game at his level through the eyes of a 46-year-old.

Yet here he is once more. The supreme player at the Crucible. Sometimes there is a champion and several others who might have been. This year, everyone agreed that o’Sullivan was head and shoulders the best around. not bad for an old man. not bad for a man who sometimes makes you think he hates it.

For that day, o’Sullivan gave the impression he wouldn’t be around for long, even if he somehow resisted the ravages of age and stayed 20/20. ‘i can’t be the ambassador of smiles,’ he said.

He has a love-hate relationship with his sport. loving the competition, working hard to be the best at it, but sometimes hating its interior nature, the absence of sunlight, all darkness, shadows and silence when he could be out running.

That is when we most often see each other now. on one of the tracks through epping Forest, o’Sullivan keeping a decent pace with a group of friends. He always looks happy, always free. There is none of the angst he can bring to the baize, yet none of the brilliance, too. But he is a genius with a cue in his hand.

Think of the sensation when Kevin Pietersen brought the switch hit to cricket. o’Sullivan can play entire frames on the switch. He breaks left-handed, continues right-handed, he can play alternate shots, he can bring that out just to escape from a fix.

one day in practice, he began potting balls left-handed, standing on one leg, just to make the point that, for him, it was about feel, not textbook technique.

His longevity is exceptional, too. Steve Davis won six titles, all in the 1980s. Stephen Hendry seven, all in the 1990s. neither won the big one past the age of 32. o’Sullivan now has world titles across three decades. He could have had several more had he learned at a younger age to control what psychiatrist Steve Peters, his mentor, calls his inner chimp.

Really, the only person who stopped o’Sullivan (below) achieving an almost unsurpassable domination of his sport was o’Sullivan. We caught a glimpse of that self-defeating quality when he became negatively engaged with referee olivier Marteel in the final this year.

Where does he stand in the pantheon of British sportsmen? Right up there. Sir Steven Redgrave. Sir andy Murray. Sir lewis Hamilton. notice anything? not only is he a generational talent, or two, he is a player who demands to be watched. Snooker feels different when o’Sullivan is at the table, the way cricket does with Ben Stokes at the crease, or football with Paul Gascoigne on the ball.

The job he did on Judd Trump this year was fitting in the way it tied him with seven-time champion Hendry. it was a performance that reminded of Hendry, but at his young peak. ‘if he saw weakness, he just went for the jugular,’ o’Sullivan recalled. ‘if he thought you didn’t have the bottle — crunch.’ That was o’Sullivan these last weeks. nothing has burned out inside him. He will be back for a swing at his eighth, the man to beat next year, again.

Meanwhile, on the wall of his house hangs a scale portrait of his most famous 147 break painstakingly recreated by his friend Damian Hirst. The size of a snooker table, with coloured circles representing the balls in the positions he potted them, it is light and vibrant, clear and beautiful. a perfect representation of the game

o’Sullivan plays.