• UK Championship

It's like McIlroy winning a major with just two rusty clubs

Ronnie O'Sullivan beat Judd Trump in a thrilling 10-9 final at the UK Championship on Sunday © Getty Images

Enlarge

"The tables are playing shocking, the cushions are bouncing… it's like the ball goes on one mile an hour and comes off at three, it should be slower. My mate thought it was a joke that the practice table was in a bar."

So said Ronnie O'Sullivan on Sunday, November 30. Four days later, he's making a maximum in the time it took players from the old school to chalk their cue and have a really tasty handful of beta-blockers. A couple more days after the 147 and he's winning the tournament 10-9 in a cracking match. Imagine what he'd be like if they got him on a decent table.

Ronnie, like all the champs in any sport, expects the best. And rightly so. The amateur snooker player might be stabbing away on a threadbare old thing with fag ash burns and a slope like Barnet's old Underhill stadium, but the pros want a perfect surface, cushions soft but firm like the thighs of a goddess, a cue ball gleaming like a freshly-dived pearl. And why wouldn't they?

Try potting on that table now, Ronnie © Getty Images

Enlarge

Related Links

• News: Trump targets Masters revenge against O'Sullivan
  

The irony is that Ronnie would still be brilliant at snooker if he played … well, traditionally in sports, you'd say "if he played left-handed". But he does that anyway. He'd still be brilliant if he played with a rolled-up umbrella, or one of Sir Geoffrey's sticks of rhubarb. It's the mere mortals who would actually benefit from the best facilities.

We used to play cricket at the Barn Elms park down in Barnes where they had, if you will forgive the Accidental Partridge, a really cracking Wetland Centre and bird … thingy. Like a kind of nature reserve, but just for feathered friends. The geese or whatever really liked to sit on the cricket field nearby, and would sometimes take noisy offence to being moved. They'd also crap on the cut strip. This would then dry and harden and become lethal and unplayable. It was like corrugated poo, and believe me, you tell yourself to get forward but once the first one has reared off a full length to give you a black eye AND a faceful of bird poo, it is no picnic . I don't think even Boycott has got an anecdote about how he had to face Mikey Holding on a pitch covered with goose crap.

These games would invariably be conducted in driving rain or with a ferocious hangover, or both. Quite often, players would be drinking heavily while waiting to bat, or waiting for the ball to go through their legs at third man, just to stave off some of the cold. If one of us (well, the opposition) hit a six, you risked life and limb at the beaks of vengeful geese getting their revenge in for all those Christmas atrocities as you fished it out of the reeds. It made the games of football we used to have on the pitch with all the heroin needles and crack pipes look like a balmy pre-season exhibition at the San Siro.

A turned ankle on a municipal tennis court with roughly the same surface as the moon, a verruca in the swimming baths, landing your golf ball in a council course fairway divot that actually turns out to be a rabbit hole … these are the challenges we amateurs face. Sure, the pros have to train insanely hard and practise all the time and never drink a beer or smoke a fag (well, apart from snooker) and they operate under huge pressure. But really, these guys have it easy. All the facilities and equipment are set up for them to succeed. It's a gilded, distant world up there.

In a way, the achievements of the great pros would be even more impressive, and certainly more relatable if they did the business in the same conditions that we do. So let's see Rory McIlroy win a major playing with just a seven iron and a rusty putter. Could MS Dhoni still play like that if there was a good chance of any delivery hitting a bottle top? And would Ronnie still be a snooker god down the local boozer?

Yeah, of course he would. He's done it at the UK Championship, after all.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd