venta

Mid-January, you say? Well, it's about time for my annual burst of interest in sport. Yup, this weekend I have been watching sport on the telly and - wait for it - live. Like I actually went, in person, to spectate at a sporting event.

I really did.

It is the season for the Masters. Apparently it is the Betfair Masters this year, but I will doubtless continue to call it the Benson & Hedges[*].

For those of you not quite keeping up, I was up at Ally Pally watching the first match of a snooker tournament. Yes, that is a sport. It's on the BBC Sport website and everything.

When I was a kid, I used to watch snooker with my dad or my great-aunt. I'm pretty sure that we watched most major championships, but it's the B&H - the invitation-only tournament for the top 16 players in the world - that was always the most exciting. The matches are often played late at night, or shown on TV late at night, and I remember being packed off to bed mid-frame or (very occasionally) allowed to stay up to watch something particularly exciting.

Yesterday saw Neil Roberston (current reigning champion and #1 seed) take on Ding Junhui (#10). I love watching Roberston play, and I don't think I've seen Ding live before. The first two frames went straight to Robertson, with the other guy barely getting a chance to come to the table. I've always thought snooker must be the worst game to lose at: I can't really think of any other sport or game where, to the same extent, the loser has to sit and watch their chances ebb away.

Now, I wanted Roberston to win. But I didn't want to see a walkover. So I switched allegiance and started rooting for Ding... come on, come on... by the mid-session interval it was all square at 2-2.

And then it was 5-3. To Ding. The first round matches are best of 11, so first to 6. Now, hang on there: you weren't meant to make that much of a comeback.

Fortunately, Robertson pulled his finger out and won three frames on the trot. But he did it with any number of slow, slow shots; the ball rolled gently towards the pocket, teetered on the brink, came to rest and.... finally fell over the edge. It went from being a fairly run of the mill game to a fantastically tense game. At times, even John Parrott stopped talking [**].

And then Robertson tipped his score over to being large enough that he was "safe" and (with a rather undignified roar of triumph) went on to clear up and win. And then everyone was streaming out of Alexandra Palace into freezing cold air, and a fabulous view of the London skyline.

I'll try and catch the rest of the tournament on the telly. The BBC Sport site claims that all matches are streamed live online, but I have yet to actually locate them.

And if nothing else, watching snooker gives you plenty of practice at multiplying by 8 and adding 27 ;)

[*] The Masters tournament was born the year before I was, and was sponsored consistently by B&H until 2003 when (as a tobacco company) they were banned from advertising. Since then the event has limped along from one sponsor to another (and occasionally not had a sponsor at all). I always thought of it as "the B&H", just as the World Snooker Championship was "the Embassy".

[**] Snooker matches are played in silence, but you can use a radio to pick up the broadcast BBC comentary in real time. This can lead to some really weird moments if you aren't listening in, when a room erupts from complete silence into laughter despite nothing having happened. John Parrott and John Virgo are one of my favourite double-act commentating teams.