SHAUN MURPHY announce that he is leaving the UK snooker immediately now presents another significant issue for the team….
HOW SHAUN MURPHY PLANS TO ‘BREAK THE MOULD’ WITH MULTI-CUE ‘INNOVATION’ TO
Traditionally, snooker players tend to stick with one cue when they take to the baize but one man has an idea to ‘break the mould’. Shaun Murphy has suggested he will start bringing multiple cues to tournaments in future and believes the sport should wake up to the ‘madness’ of playing using just one. His idea might not necessarily be too popular among his peers however.
Shaun Murphy has had a brainwave. Given the varying playing conditions in different parts of the globe on the World Snooker Tour, he is planning to bring three cues into the arena in the near future.
They will each be designed to account for the way the balls react on any given cloth, particularly in places with high humidity.
cavemen when we expect one cue to perform the same everywhere around the world. That is just madness.”
Murphy has clearly given the matter thought. Rather than just hope for the best regardless of conditions, he is trying to give himself as much of an advantage as he can.
“I’m always looking to try and improve,” he said. “It’s been frustrating in my career running into these different types of conditions.
“In Shanghai it is very humid, in Germany the temperatures were off the scale. That affects the cloth and the way the balls spin around the table. It has been incredibly frustrating just having to accept it and move on, that isn’t very professional. We are a little bit behind and I’d like to have been earlier with these innovations. They are coming and hopefully they will make a difference.”
Other players look at this with not a little scepticism.
“It would be brain damage for me,” was Kyren Wilson’s response to Murphy’s idea. “It’s just the one cue for me and if conditions don’t suit it then I’ll just have to find a way of battling through it.”
on a plane? There’s enough anxiety for players as it is as they gather at the baggage carousel to see if the familiar long rectangular case has made the journey with them. Brecel’s cue went missing recently after an exhibition in Seattle, only turning up weeks later and causing him much anxiety in the meantime.
Would Murphy put the three cues together in a case and risk losing all of them? Or would he attempt to check each one in separately? If so, he might have to win the tournament to break even on excess baggage.
The significance of all of this is that a snooker player’s cue feels too intimate a component part of what they do to be considered a mere piece of equipment. It is intrinsic to their identity, a partner when at the table, and history tells us that the relationship can be obsessive.
When Steve Davis appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1983 he claimed that he took his cue to bed with him. This is extreme devotion but illustrates the centrality of the piece of wood to a player’s entire psyche.
In May 1997, the Canadian Alain Robidoux had just enjoyed his best-ever season, reaching a ranking final in Germany, the World Championship semi-finals and achieving his highest ranking of ninth. He needed repair work done to his cue so sent it to the man who originally manufactured it.
The cue-maker was very much a traditionalist and, appalled at seeing a sponsor’s logo Robidoux had attached to the butt end of the cue, smashed it into four pieces. Angered and heartbroken in equal measure, Robidoux’s form and confidence collapsed. The following season he did not win a single match and was never the same again.
