Snooker is the world’s most skilled, absorbing, tactically subtle sport. Give it a break!

The greatest event in the sporting calendar is on us once more: the World Professional Snooker Championship. With an opening sentence like that you’re probably expecting one of those ironically post-modern ‘let’s go slumming with the plebs’ pieces. Well don’t. I’m serious. Snooker is criminally undervalued. The next two weeks in Sheffield offer the finest entertainment sport can provide.

Yes, yes, I know the arguments. ‘Not a proper sport if you can play it while smoking a fag.’ Well that applies to cricket, as anyone who’s seen Phil Tufnell in a charity match can tell you. ‘Just a pub game.’ No, that’s pool. You try getting a 12 foot by 6 foot table into a boozer. ‘My God,’ pool dabblers always say on their first snooker shot, the baize stretching before them like Norfolk. ‘It’s so big.’

More than any other sport, snooker suffers from the problem of the pros making it look easy.