Leave the Worlds alone, revamp the UK

wildJONESEYE wrote:

randam05 wrote:right like monique says it needs its location changing..im thinking south england..name me one tournament other than the masters in the actual south of england? its pathetic. I live in devon, the south west and the welsh open is nearest then the masters which are still hours away and why is all snooker up north for no apparent reason! it annoys me a lot cause its rare i can travel easily to a tournament

i take your point and it is a good point.

they used to have the Grand Prix at the hexagon reading but for me the UK's spiritual home is Preston

i lived in reading until 3 years ago and stay there a lot so im gutted there isnt tournaments at the hexagon no more as i lived no more than 5 mins from there. I hear the players loved the hexagon a lot. The commentators mention it from time to time

We're all in agreement on one thing though: this tournament DOES need change. Unlike the World Championship.

The World and the Masters are perfect, should be left untouched as Wild correctly pointed out. The UK needs a bit of something.

I don't think a set format would work in Snooker because the frames are too long. The Sets format works well in sports which have short games. If you look at the World Open the b-o-5 matches all lasted at least an hour which is too long for a set.

Moving it back to Preston is a no brainer but I'm not sure if it's possible right now as I remember reading that Rodney Walker signed a deal to keep it in Telford until 2013. Returning to the 64 man format of the 80's & 90's would be good but it would only be the last 16 onwards that get on TV and I can't see them taking the risk that some big names being knocked out early.

KrazeeEyezKilla wrote:I don't think a set format would work in Snooker because the frames are too long. The Sets format works well in sports which have short games. If you look at the World Open the b-o-5 matches all lasted at least an hour which is too long for a set.

Moving it back to Preston is a no brainer but I'm not sure if it's possible right now as I remember reading that Rodney Walker signed a deal to keep it in Telford until 2013. Returning to the 64 man format of the 80's & 90's would be good but it would only be the last 16 onwards that get on TV and I can't see them taking the risk that some big names being knocked out early.

The sets I'm suggesting are best-of-3, which would be a reasonably similar length to a set in tennis time wise I would say.

Didn't one of the matches last upwards of 2 and a half hours, can't remember which might have been Dunn vs Campbell or Ebdon vs someone ? That's where it could create a problem.

They should go back to only televising the Last 16 plus the top 4 seeds' Last 32 games. That why there can be two televised tables and nobody can miss out on matches.

Sets is a daft idea, as I said on another thread, you don't want to start changing with the fundamentals of the way snooker works, or you just alienate the obsessive fans and confuse the hell out of the casual ones. Golf springs to mind, it used to be that golf tournaments would be split between strokeplay, matchplay and stableford scoring systems, now no pro tournaments anywhere are played with stableford, and there's only 1/2 a year played with matchplay (and those are struggling, and would probably be dead if they weren't used as practice for the Ryder Cup). For golf fans who liked those two formats its a shame, but it has to happen because sports can't afford to contradict themselves. Shortening things, T20 cricket, six reds, rugby sevens, is one thing, having completely different systems in another.

I think all the UKs needs is a bit of publicity, it just gets overlooked nowadays. The BBC treats it more like the Grand Prix/World Open/whatever than it does the Masters or the Worlds, it doesn't have the glamour of Wembley or the history and tension of the Crucible. Telford shouldn't be a bad venue really, there was nothing spectacularly great about Preston and Telford is a reasonably handy location for access. I think it just needs Hearn to jazz things up a bit. Maybe this should be the tournament where they really go for the darts-style crowds, noise and shouting and beer. That's all it needs, a bit of excitement and its own identity.