Martin Smith: Here's to Sheffield, Ronnie and the BBC

BBC TV’s annual love letter to Sheffield had an extra poignancy as their lens lingered lovingly on the World Championship final’s moody and romantic opening shots of snooker city.

How many in other towns and cities on hearing that poetry and seeing those pictures would longingly promise each other, again, that they must visit or return to Sheffield?

Even a disappointingly one-sided finale couldn’t take the edge off a championship given special significance by its being held at all.

An unforgettable asterisk in the record books.

The full anti-social tyranny of social distancing was never laid more bare than in the shots of Crucible action with a backdrop of individuals and small bubbles of family members where normally there is a heaving, cheering, coughing crowd.

Unlike football where fake fan noises only add to the general air of alienation, snooker thrives and feeds on the forced and trembling silence that only the Crucible can create.

The oohs, aahs and explosions of applause that follow brilliance on the baize were reduced but still profound.

Sheffield, and the BBC at its best, did it again.

As of course did six-times champion Ronnie O’Sullivan whose talent at the table was matched on enough occasions by sufficient concentration to allow his game to flourish.

At times he has the cueing action of an angry amateur unable to understand why he can’t play.

On those occasions as he lowers his head to make the instinctive calculation on time, space and cue ball it seems as though his mind won’t transmit the equation to his elbow.

Then he rears in rejection at the sheer mind-numbing repetition of his work and the shot is lost.

Or perhaps sometimes he just can’t be arsed with it.

Either way that internal battle is a key element of his game and, it seems, his life.

The sport and the championships will be so much the poorer for his absence, whenever that may come.

But where are the characters coming through? The next Hendry, Taylor or Higgins?

Like all sports the snooker characters come and go, and the golden age always seems to have been the day before yesterday.

We always think we are in the best or worst of times and often we’re right.

But there are individuals and organisations that rise to the occasion in every era.

Here’s to Sheffield, Ronnie and the BBC.