There
are many reasons to welcome the new Champion of Champions event.
It’s
a return to host broadcasting by ITV. There’s £100,000 to the winner. It’s
another tournament in the UK, the game’s traditional home.
But
more than anything, it’s welcome because it’s NOT a ranking event. Instead, it
is purely for the elite: players who have won titles. There’s no talk of
points, seedings or cut-offs. It’s all about prestige.
Every
sport has events like this. They are additional rewards for those who have been
successful.
Of
course, the Masters has been the sport’s leading invitation tournament for the
last four decades. The Masters is special precisely because it’s for the top 16.
It stands out because it isn’t a ranking event.
But
so many other good and popular invite-only events have fallen by the wayside.
And that’s a shame.
The
Irish Masters was a terrific event. Played at the Goffs showring in Kildare – a
bearpit like atmosphere – it was 12 top players and it was a huge deal for a
quarter of a century.
Then
in 2003 it was given ranking status and the whole feel of the event changed
(though this was admittedly also due to a venue and sponsor change). It hasn’t
been staged since 2005.
The
Scottish Masters – first sponsored by Langs in the 1980s and then revived by
Regal – was another prestigious, invitation only tournament which had its own
distinctive feel. Events in Belgium, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many
other places all flew the flag for snooker. Look at Steve Davis’s record of
career wins and at how many long forgotten titles he won.
The
pioneer of invitation events is the man now broadly against them: Barry Hearn.
It
was Hearn’s energy and entrepreneurship which saw tournaments taken to then
unlikely corners of the globe in the 1980s: Thailand, Hong Kong, China and Dubai
among them.
Hearn’s
stable boasted many of the best players of the day, in particular the world
no.1, Davis. What his events did was test the water and prove that markets for
snooker existed in these countries. Invariably the WPBSA then pitched up and
put on ranking tournaments off the back of Hearn’s initial hard work.
These
days Hearn has changed hats. He is no longer just an independent promoter but
the chairman of World Snooker, with 128 players to think about.
Even
so, if the strategy from now on is to have a ranking event in a particular
country or nothing then this seems like an opportunity lost.
You
need a lot of money to stage a ranking tournament: there’s venue hire,
operating costs and the prize fund, not all of which are offset by ticket
sales, sponsorship and broadcast money.
Invitation
events, with their smaller fields, are cheaper and have the virtue of taking
the snooker temperature in any given country.
For
instance, a tournament was taken to Brazil in 2011. It hasn’t been held since
but does not seem to have financially damaged the governing body.
How
different to the 2008 Bahrain Championship, a full ranking event which
reportedly inflicted on the WPBSA a six figure loss.
Some
would say that tournaments should be open to all professionals. I think most
should be but there should surely also be room for eight, 12 or 16 man events
which are over more quickly and showcase the star names. After all, the world
no.100 currently has a choice of around 25 events to play in, hardly a famine.
One
of the problems with invitation events is the thorny issue of who exactly is invited. It’s fair to
say criteria for various competitions has been elastic down the years (one year
Hearn shrewdly made up an eight man field in China with seven players from his
stable and Rex Williams, the then WPBSA chairman).
Darren
Morgan once won the Irish Masters, lost 9-8 in the final the following year and
was never invited back.
Then
again, it’s a harsh fact of the commercial world that promoters can invite
whoever they like.
Another
concern with invitation events is that without the ranking system underpinning
them they are meaningless. It’s true that some have felt this way in the past,
particularly when players have looked relatively uninterested, but a large
prize fund tends to focus the mind.
To
most TV viewers, snooker is snooker. It is meaningful if it is being played to
a high standard and more so if it’s being played by people they recognise.
The
main thing, of course, is that there is so much snooker now. But there’s a
danger tournaments may be getting too long – the UK Championship this season will
last 13 days.
It
strikes me that mainland Europe is the area most ripe for some small, short
invitation events.
Germany
is a growth area but there are many other countries which want events but
probably could not financially sustain a full blown ranking tournament or even
a PTC.
History
tells us that today’s invitation event is often tomorrow’s ranking tournament.
This is why the door should remain open on them, or at the very least ajar.