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Snooker.

I really enjoyed this year's World Snooker Championships. Not only because I enjoy and am interested in snooker, but also because I have hardly come across anything else interesting and contemporary on sports channels. The excellent O'Sullivan, the excellent Mc Gill and Wilson, the very good but a bit brooding Selby and many others made me happy with their performances. A slight handicap to the atmosphere of the broadcasts was the lack of footage of the audience sitting in the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield with headphones on. Despite this, snooker was a huge success - it was just about the only sport at World Championship level to stage an event that filled both Eurosport programmes for many days. This brought it up to the level of mass sports such as football, hockey, tennis, cycling or motor sport, which also managed to appear on the screens in these difficult times. Although it may not seem like it, there is still a battle for every viewer, every fan. And this problematic period is perhaps a unique opportunity to gain the attention of those who are fed up with the lack of live, dramatic sporting and cultural coverage, and would be willing to watch almost anything just because it's LIVE. Indeed, I have verified that several people in my area have watched the World Snooker Championships, despite never having watched cue balls on TV before. Hopefully some other live sport such as curling will be on the screens in the autumn, despite the pessimistic predictions of experts predicting a time of shrouding, quarantine and isolation. Fans need to be fought for, nurtured, marketed to and retained. Otherwise, they will find something else and it won't be easy to win them back.

The photo is of current world snooker champion Ronnie O'Sullivan.

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