You may have seen the famous clip of Diego Maradona’s warm-up routine, from the second leg of Napoli’s Uefa Cup semi-final against Bayern Munich in 1989: the one where he is like a Marvel superhero with a football. It is not just that Maradona pogos up and down with the ball seemingly glued to his head. Or that he effortlessly juggles the ball on his knees while jogging – before upping the ante by then bouncing it repeatedly off alternate shoulders. It is that the greatest player of all time is doing all this, and many other nonchalant tricks and flicks, with his shoelaces untied.
Maradona’s extraordinary routine, which has been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube, came to mind again while watching another renegade master, Ronnie O’Sullivan, caress, finesse and blast his way to another world snooker final. For retired professional-turned-pundit Alan McManus, the Rocket’s red and black combination against John Higgins were the best two shots back-to-back he has seen in a semi-final, while these eyes slightly preferred the blunt power of a red to the middle against Stephen Maguire. Either way, O’Sullivan has a rare knack of making the ball dance to his tune, just like El Diego.
And if he does win a magnificent seventh world title by converting his 12-5 lead over Judd Trump on Monday – a feat that would equal Stephen Hendry’s record – the clamour for him to be ordained as the greatest ever will become a crescendo. I am not quite there – yet. O’Sullivan is a genius. But I still make Hendry primus inter pares, by a squeak.
Let me build a case. It starts by pointing out that no one else in the modern era can hold a cue to what Hendry did in the 1990s, when he ruled the sport and was the youngest world champion in history at 21. Back in the late 90s, in my early days as a journalist on Total Sport, I visited Hendry’s club in Stirling for our Show Us Your Medals section. There were so many – 70 titles in total – that we had to settle on just a dozen. He was that dominant.
For good measure Hendry also spent a record‑breaking nine years as world No 1, ahead of Steve Davis on seven. O’Sullivan, whose career began 30 years ago, has spent five years on top. In the past fortnight there has been a lot of talk about the “Class of 92” – O’Sullivan, Higgins and Mark Williams. And rightly so. But Hendry, in his prime, often took them to school.
Back then Hendry could pot with the best of them and he was also blessed with a natural immunity to pressure. Never was that better illustrated when, 30 years ago this week, he came from 14-8 down to defeat Jimmy White 18-14 and win the 1992 world title in what Clive Everton described on these pages as the “most dramatic and emphatic recovery seen in a Crucible final”.
Perhaps the crucial moment came at 14-9 down as Hendry, with the cue ball in the jaws of the middle pocket, rolled in a brilliant brown. “Had he missed it he would have certainly trailed 15-9,” wrote Everton. “But by potting it he showed he was not intimidated by the score, the opponent, the occasion or the huge crowd largely rooting for White.” History repeated itself in 1993 when Hendry thrashed White 18-5 in the world championship final, having lost only 25 frames in five matches. That was a staggering enough feat. But the Scot was able to surpass it in 1994, beating White 18-17 in the final despite fracturing an elbow while going to the bathroom in the middle of the night earlier in the tournament. It only solidified the image of Hendry as snooker’s Terminator: a cold-blooded destroyer even with one arm barely functioning.
And Hendry did all this despite never being a darling of the masses, like the Rocket or Whirlwind. We hear a lot of talk about the benefits of home advantage in sport but Hendry usually had the crowd against him – and worse. Facing White at Wembley was particularly bad. “I always have people shouting ‘miss’ underneath their breath when I’m right on the shot and stuff like that,” Hendry told me, before saying: “I’ve had a lot of success there, so I can’t say it put me off.”
Yet after Hendry’s seventh and final world title in 1999, something changed. In an interview with Donald McRae on these pages in 2018 he admitted that, when he began to socialise with the other players, it “affected his invincibility” – although he attributed his decline more to a serious version of a golfer’s yips, which began in 2000.
Inevitably it means there is a recency bias towards O’Sullivan when the topic of the greatest comes up. But last week O’Sullivan himself acknowledged just how good Hendry was in his prime, saying: “He used to play six hours a day and didn’t miss a ball. There is no one dominating the sport like he did, like Tiger Woods did.” It says something of the class of both men that Hendry was just as effusive about O’Sullivan. “No one does it better,” he said. “You cannot play better snooker than that. He is just supreme in all departments.”
It is hard to argue. But my mind keeps coming back to a match the two men played in the 1997 Liverpool Victoria Charity Challenge, which featured seven centuries and is widely regarded as one of the best ever. Hendry went 8-2 up in a best-of-17 encounter. O’Sullivan pulled it back to 8-8. The Scot’s response? To hit a match-winning 147.
