Opinion

TONY Drago recently commented that the top 8 players of today are not up to the standard of the top 8 of the 1990s.

Certainly, one cannot see any player winning seven world titles in the space of a decade, as Stephen Hendry did in the 90s, but to claim that the quality of the top 8 players is lower now than back then doesn’t make much sense when examined more closely.

Let us take a look at the top 8 for the 1995/96 season for a moment. Hendry ended the season on top spot, as you’d expect. Steve Davis finished second, but whilst he was still competitive, his long-potting game was by then not as consistent as it had been a decade earlier.

In third was Ronnie, who still had a lot of maturing to do before reaching his potential. He was followed by John Parrott, James Wattana, Alan McManus, Jimmy White and Darren Morgan.

Compare them to the current top 8, which can be found elsewhere on this website. Is Drago seriously suggesting that Darren Morgan was a significantly better player than, say, Neil Robertson or Shaun Murphy?

If anything, aside from Hendry, the top 8 of today are slightly better than the top 8 of the mid 1990s, and are certainly no worse, as Drago implies. There is, however, one crucial difference between then and now, and that is the depth of the players that come below.

Forget the 90s for a moment. Cast your mind back to the 80s. Back then, if there were 32 players in a tournament, you could be pretty certain of picking a winner out of half a dozen or so. The rest, although often characters and real entertainers, were only ever there to make up the numbers. By the mid-90s, you could probably pick a winner from the top 16 of the 32 players taking part.

Compare that to today. The top 32 players are all more than capable of beating each other. The current world number 32, Gerard Greene, is in great form and reached the semi-final of the Grand Prix last autumn, and world number 22 Jamie Cope is now regularly reaching the latter stages of ranking tournaments.

Nowadays, not one single player is there to make up the numbers. They are all good players in their own right. The thing Drago doesn’t seem to grasp is that the gulf between the top 8 and the rest is actually very small, and ultimately boils down to consistency rather than ability.

The most consistent four players in the world at present are Mark Selby, John Higgins, Ken Doherty and Ronnie O’Sullivan, in that order, with Neil Robertson not far behind. Yet none of these feature in the latter stages of every single tournament, and it really isn’t that much of a surprise when someone with a far lower ranking goes on to beat them.
Drago is smart enough to know what has happened in snooker, because exactly the same situation has existed for years in nine-ball pool, the game he prefers to spend more time on these days.

In their case, even the true legends of the game like Efren Reyes and Earl Strickland have not managed to win the World Championship six times in a decade, as Steve Davis did, or seven times, as Stephen Hendry did.
This is to take nothing away from Reyes or Strickland’s ability, it only happened because there is so much depth. This year’s tournament proved that, when Englishman Daryl Peach won the title, having played the game for many years without ever even reaching the final before.

The fact that we can now put a pin on the name of any snooker player in any tournament and know for sure they have a realistic chance of winning it is something worth celebrating.

The depth is now much greater than it has ever been before, and to suggest otherwise is to pay a disservice to the unpredictable nature of every tournament that takes place.

Do you agree with Tony Drago or Marcus Stead? Debate with us in the forum.