DOES BURNOUT EXIST?

The answer to my own question is almost certainly yes, it does, but with some qualifiers.

There’s been a lot more snooker of late and a lot more to come before the betfred.com World Championship in April.

You’ll hear talk of burnout and players too exhausted to seriously compete at the Crucible, but what is the actual evidence for this?

Last season John Higgins played in everything he could and was in such good form that he went all the way to a fourth world title.

Ronnie O’Sullivan opted out of quite a few events and was clearly rusty in the run-in to Sheffield.

OK, this is not the most scientific example. Higgins is a great player and could win the world title any year regardless of how much he has played. O’Sullivan was low on motivation and wanted out of the game for good.

However, if you are looking for a likely winner come May 7 surely a player who has been playing a great deal would be a better bet than someone who has been losing early?

Momentum is important in sport because it is linked to confidence. Mark Selby started the season with this very commodity. He won the Wuxi Classic and shortly afterwards the Paul Hunter Classic and then the Shanghai Masters.

But runs come to an end and Selby was a disappointment against Marco Fu at the recent UK Championship. The good news is that players experience peaks and troughs and I’m sure the world no.1 will get going again soon.

Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry were the dominant players of their respective eras and the more they played, the more they won. In Hendry’s case he won five successive ranking events during one particularly purple patch.

But when they weren’t playing in tournaments they were on the exhibition circuit making serious money and, in the case of Davis, conquering new horizons with his manager, Barry Hearn.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of Davis’s 147 at the 1982 Lada Classic, the first in professional competition.

He had in fact just returned from a round-the-world trip so tiring that he was falling asleep between matches.

Later that year he was signing copies of his book in a newsagent’s in Sheffield a few hours before playing Tony Knowles in the World Championship. We all know how that played out.

Hendry, like Davis, was no slouch but he was a young man and had the bloody-minded professionalism to grind it out, understanding that this was his time to cash in on his success. Not many players since have had that same attitude.

But it isn’t really the amount of snooker being played that could lead to burnout – the more you play, the tougher you should in theory be – it’s the travelling.

Flying back and forth to places like China does take a toll. I’m sure many people will feel this is part of sport and, frankly, tough if you don’t like it, but a long season of planes, trains and automobiles can be physically demanding, especially as the calendar isn’t structured like golf and tennis where events in a particular part of the world come one after another.

This year there will be two new ranking events in China, further increasing the air miles top players will rack up.

I know a few players who love all this, and they are the ones prospering, but there will come a time, particularly for older players, where the prospect of another flight, another hotel becomes irksome to the point where it will negatively affect mental attitude.

It’s easy to say they are only playing snooker but not true. They are also investing huge mental reserves into their profession and travelling here, there and everywhere to play.

So burnout is a risk but as more tournaments crop up, there will be more choice and players can better manage their schedules.

And I’d still back a player with momentum come the Crucible than those who have hardly played at all.