Behind the scenes at The Crucible

Sheffield, like Rome, was built on seven hills. There, the similarity ends, of course. Because Rome, for all its ancient history, architectural beauty and hot paninis, has never hosted a snooker tournament of any note.
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Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, on the other hand, has been home to the Embassy World Snooker Championship for 28 years. So when it comes to making hard cash from a sport that’s regularly labelled ‘one of the easiest to call – there’s only two players, form counts for everything and you can’t get a draw’ (source: any local pub in Britain), there’s no better place to be than in South Yorkshire, stroking your lucky rabbit’s foot and flicking through the order of play.

Which is exactly where we find ourselves at 9am on 18 April, day three of the tournament. Today, the 900-seater Crucible is sold out for the action that’s cueing off between Shaun Murphy and Chris Small. This is a supposedly minor skirmish (with Murphy at 150/1 and Small at 200/1 to win outright) in which the winner can reasonably expect to exit before the quarterfinals. We settle in the bar with the serious punters to watch the action on TV, sip breakfast Stellas and check the action at the Totesport booth, the official bookmaking partner to the event.

Hair of the dog
Around us there is one name on everybody’s lips: Ronnie ‘Rocket’ O’Sullivan. The shortest-priced favourite for decades, the Rocket was chalked up at 10/11, then 8/11 to win outright, and has just closed to 4/5 with the Tote.

Now, that’s not exactly a give-away price, given we’re only at day two of the Championship, but the punting cognoscenti are supremely confident that Rocket Ronnie cannot be grounded. Inside info buzzing round the bar reveals he’s even been training with Sheffield favourite Prince Naseem Hamed, former world boxing champ, to get his fitness levels up for the 17-day event.

Roy, a semi-pro punter from Nottingham built like an ex-miner, is on his third pint of Ward’s bitter and happy to share advice with us. He’s already made £20,000 this year from the baize and balls and, in between running a minicab company, makes it his business to know snooker form inside out.

‘Ronnie has already won this,’ he claims with absolute certainty from behind broken teeth. ‘He’s not going to come out in public and say that, obviously – that would be suicide, but he has already won it. I saw a plastic bag with £10,000 go onto the Tote this morning. It was from one of Jimmy White’s crew and it had to be on Ronnie.’ But what about value, we ask? The bookies are hardly giving much away, are they?

Well endowed
‘Look, Dave, 4/5 is still massive,’ counters Roy, as his mate Glenn nods in agreement. ‘You could pay your mortgage off with that. Forget your endowments, there’s nothing you want your money on more than O’Sullivan – the rest are mere mortals. You know why O’Sullivan looks so gutted? Because it takes him a whole two weeks to get what is his, and he can’t get it any quicker. That’s what all those supposedly negative quotes in the papers about motivation are about.’

We chat to a couple more pro punters who don’t want to be identified. Considerably more discreet than Roy – and, by the cut of their suits, significantly higher rolling – they nonetheless share the basic view that this isn’t the Embassy tournament, it’s the O’Sullivan invitational. If we want value, they suggest, bet frame-by-frame or look for an each-way punt in the other half of the draw on a player such as Stephen Hendry.

Murphy beats Small. Big Roy is gloating: he’d backed Murphy at ‘with a small £800’ on Betfair. We head backstage to try and sniff out the kind of edge you can only get by actually being at a live sports gambling event. If there’s a way today to beat the bookies by superior knowledge, we’re determined to find it.

The first potential source of info we find is the ever-amiable Willie Thorne, here commentating for the BBC. Now Willie may have done the best part of £4 million in his 30-year snooker and sports gambling career, but he’s still more than happy to give us some cash-winning pointers.

‘Look for form above anything,’ he suggests. ‘Small versus Murphy has just finished, and the outcome of that was never in doubt. Shaun Murphy’s a good player, not a great player (you might want to revise that, Willie, in the light of subsequent events at the Crucible – Ed), and he was playing against Small, who hasn’t won a match all year. Okay, I would have had to bet 2/5, but it was worth going big. Then again, Murphy has been here only once before and rookie newcomers can crap their pants.

‘And forget the spreads,’ he adds helpfully. ‘This is absolutely the worst venue to play spreads. You either play good or bad and there is no in-between. The Crucible does funny things to players. Look at the Steve Davis-Gerard Greene game yesterday. At any other venue, I would have backed Gerard over Steve, but not here. Steve has been here, done it and bought the T-shirt.’

Flat-cap-tulence
Jimmy White passes us backstage, his Essex crew in tow. ‘The Whirlwind’ is dressed to kill, with winkle-pickers and fl at cap, but we reckon he’s carrying too much weight and too much blue-rinsed expectation to be anything more than a mild breeze this time round. On we go to the players’ practice room. Now, there has got to be something we can squeeze out of here.

We’re in luck. Much-fancied castle-dwelling Scot Stephen Hendry is practising with Welsh wizard Mark Williams, whose Crucible moment came in the first round this year when he knocked in a maximum 147 break against Robert Milkins. Hendry, with his Calvin Klein boxers hanging out of his jeans, is considerably less grumpy than usual. Is that a good sign? Perhaps – but then playing partner Williams is giving nothing away. And he won’t even talk about the betting, as if it’s some kind of deadly affliction.

In bounces Steve Davis – fit as a butcher’s dog – to chat to the lads. If snooker has an ambassador, here he is, and within minutes he has all the players present doing an exclusive ‘world champions’ photoshoot for us. Davis looks sharp, talks sharp and he’s on his way to the quarters. Even if our snapper does open a door in error which whacks his arm. ‘My fault entirely, breezes Davis diplomatically. ‘I shouldn’t have been standing there.’

What’s hot in the Crucible?
Back in the bar, first-round flop David Gray is smashed out of his mind on lager and groping some large bird in a corner. Nice work if you can get it. And Totesport’s odds-compiler Tim Pickering is giving us the lowdown on the betting so far.

‘There’s massive interest here in betting frame-by-frame,’ explains Tim. ‘We don’t bet in-running because it would be chaotic – we’re getting up to 40 punters at a time rushing up for action. Most of these guys don’t actually go into the hall to watch the play even though they’ve bought tickets – they’re here for the gambling.

‘You do get a great betting buzz at the Crucible,’ he adds. ‘We’re betting with players, managers and connections, so quite a lot of people have a potential edge over me. We took our biggest cash bet of the season yesterday of £14,000 for Anthony Hamilton at 4/11 to win the next frame against David Gray. He did. And we’ve taken individual bets in thousands on O’Sullivan in cash, of course.’

It’s that man O’Sullivan again. And it’s make your mind up time. We pile in at 4/5 with 500 big ones. Sometimes you have to follow your instinct, to put your money where your mouth is and your stick in the sand.

Of course, if you’re reading this you have the benefit of hindsight and know exactly what happened next. And yes, I can hear you laughing from here. In the worst possible advert for snooker, plodder Peter Ebdon ground Ronnie O’Sullivan down and out of the championships (and possibly into early retirement) with the most mind-numbing, drawn-out performance I’ve ever seen. ‘Ronnie Rocket’, more George Stephenson than Apollo 13, defused and went to sleep. Rumour has it he was woken by the cleaners the next morning. Only then did he realise that he’d lost.

Murphy’s flaw
And Shaun Murphy? All we had to do was ‘follow the form’, remember? This ‘rookie newcomer’ – who had been to the Crucible only once before, who ‘isn’t a great player’, the 150/1 outsider – beat Matthew Stevens in the Embassy final. If you’d got on him last November, you could even have had 200/1 with Totesport.

‘Snooker, the easiest sport to bet on? The easiest to call – just follow the form?!’ You’ve got to be joking. Financial spreads are a doddle compared to this.