As he takes a drag from his cigarette, Ronnie O’Sullivan issues a health warning to young snooker fans. Only it is not smoking that he is advising them against.

‘You get one life and you should choose something that doesn’t tug at your heartstrings quite as much,’ says the greatest snooker player of all time, speaking to Mail Sport, fag in hand, from his home in Essex. 

‘That’s what snooker has done to me. I wouldn’t want anyone that I care about to go through what I went through.

‘Most people who live in the real world probably have four or five different jobs in their career. But as a sportsman, you only get one, so you have to stick with it whether it’s good or bad. You have got to stay in it until you decide that it’s not working for you.’

In January, O’Sullivan decided that snooker was not working for him. He pulled out of the Masters as defending champion, and has gone on to skip four further tournaments on medical grounds.

Ronnie O’Sullivan recently returned to the practice table following a short break

In January, O’Sullivan pulled out of the Masters, as defending champion after being ‘burnt out’

Six days out from this year’s World Championship, the veteran’s participation is in doubt

The Rocket has recently returned to the practice table and even hit two maximum breaks — including one in only 6min 23sec — while playing locals at his academy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Yet just six days out from the start of this year’s World Championship, the record seven-time champion has still not decided if he will enter the draw. 

O’Sullivan has not missed the Crucible event since making his debut there in 1993, but he will wait until after his final practice session on Wednesday to make the call. ‘If it’s like it is today, it’s just not going to be pretty for me,’ says one of sport’s most tortured souls on the day we chat.

As for his long-term future, O’Sullivan — who turns 50 in December — has set himself another deadline to try to rediscover his form and love for the sport. ‘I’m not quitting just yet, but I will give myself two years to try and figure it out,’ reveals the world No5, who is now being coached by long-time associate Gary Filtness.

‘I don’t want to finish my career feeling like I wasn’t really performing to the level that I know I can. I don’t have to win tournaments, but I just want to feel like I’m enjoying the game. I’d like to go out with a smile on my face.

‘I have to try and repair myself and just try and find how I used to play snooker. It’s a massive rebuilding process and probably the last one I’ll ever have to do as a snooker player.

‘Do I think I can do it? Probably not if I’m being honest. I think it’s probably a bit too late in my career and I’m probably damaged goods in the form of a snooker player. You take a lot of battle scars over the years. But I’m not prepared to quit at this point because I feel like I would be quitting on a bit of a low.’ 

So how has O’Sullivan — who picked up his last world title as recently as 2022 and won the UK Championship and Masters just last season — plumbed such depths?

Breaking point, quite literally, came in January at the Championship League in Leicester, when he snapped his cue and binned it after a 3-2 defeat to Robert Milkins. He insists, however, that his red-mist moment had been on the cards for some time.

O’Sullivan last won the World Snooker Championship in 2022, securing his seventh title

The 49 year-old has not missed the Crucible event since making his debut there in 1993

‘I regret it, but that wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, I’d had four years of just really struggling and I just couldn’t take it anymore,’ explains O’Sullivan, who says he is still searching for a new cue he is comfortable with. 

‘It wasn’t the losing, it was the playing really, really badly. Four years of bad spells is a long time, so it burnt me out. It ground me down. It’s been torturous. I got to the point, especially at the start of the season, when I was getting scared to go near the practice table or getting scared to get my cue out of my case.

‘I tried playing left-handed for a whole month in August. Then I tried to change my bridge and I was wearing plasters on my fingers. So I have tried a lot of things but I’ve hit a dead end, which is why I needed to take time out.

‘It’s not a mental thing. It’s more of a physical thing. It’s really hard to explain. Watching my game on TV, I could see what was wrong, but I just didn’t know how to fix it. In the end, I couldn’t even watch myself play because I just hated it.

‘I believe that goes back six years to when I started changing my technique to try to find that extra five per cent of consistency. But I’ve totally made my game worse.’

Regrets over technique tinkering date back much further than six years. ‘My biggest mistake was when I was like 13, 14, trying to copy players like James Wattana and Ken Doherty,’ says O’Sullivan. ‘They were the best players I’d ever seen live and I thought I needed to cue like them.

‘That’s where the problems started. I should never have gone away from what I had because what I had was better than anybody else has ever had, in my opinion. I was self-taught. It was just very solid, very natural. I played for fun then.’

Fun is not something O’Sullivan has had at a snooker table for some time. ‘I think the last time I actually enjoyed playing was probably about 2018,’ he admits.

O’Sullivan says the last time he enjoyed competing in snooker was in 2018

He has set himself two years to try to rediscover his form and love for the sport

In the past, O’Sullivan has turned to running — the title of his 2013 autobiography — to help him through tough times, whether that be recovering from alcohol and drug addictions or battling depression. However, he has only just laced up his trainers again. 

‘I thought if I am going to play at Sheffield, I need to at least try and get myself into some sort of training,’ he says. ‘So I started running again a couple of days ago, but I only ran for 12 minutes. That’s all I could do because I haven’t done anything since mid-December.’

Not since 2012-13 has O’Sullivan taken such a long break from snooker. During that season-long sabbatical, he did voluntary work at a farm in Epping Forest three days a week, feeding animals and cleaning out stables and pigsties.

‘It was nice to meet different people and different characters, who wanted something to do to give back,’ recalls the TNT Sports pundit. ‘Not someone who wants a selfie and who says, “You’re great”.

‘They didn’t give a s*** down there, it was just like, “Are you going to do some work or sit on you’re a*** and do nothing?”. It was good fun.’

Incredibly, having played just one competitive match that campaign, O’Sullivan made his comeback at the Crucible in April 2013 and successfully defended his title. So, could he make another victorious return this year and win an eighth world crown, giving him the outright record ahead of Stephen Hendry?

‘No,’ comes the instant reply. ‘In 2013, I didn’t pick my cue up for nine months, but when I did pick my cue up, I was hitting the ball like a dream.

‘I’m now coming from a point where, if I was to go to Sheffield, I’d be happy with just winning a match. I think that’d be a good result for me. If I got one win, I’d be over the moon.’

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