UK Championship will take the season to a new level

The snooker season is actually five months old already. It’s been brilliant so far as well, of course it has. We’ve seen superbly staged tournaments, memorable finals, great stories. The rivalry between Judd Trump and Kyren Wilson seems to have intensified, with the world champion having the better of finals in Xi’an and Belfast. Xiao Guodong finally won the ranking event his talents have long promised. Mark Williams has proved once again his eternal excellence just months before his 50th birthday. Ding Junhui returned to the winner’s circle at last.I could go on, but you get the picture. It’s been a delight all the way. Snooker food for the soul.But with all that said, for so many of us the season will go up a level in the coming days. It’s what the peak sporting weeks are all about.The triple crown concept in snooker is a flawed one. I find myself on occasion nodding along with its critics.It is new, absolutely no question about it. Nobody had heard of it until about 15 years ago.The tournaments aren’t equal in status either, because nothing compares to the 17-day World Championship marathon every April and May.But despite its imperfections, it tends to work because sports fans like those extra special events in the calendar. It’s what makes them tick.And while the majors in golf and tennis may be older and in so many ways neater, snooker’s biggest three tournaments elevate the campaign every time they roll around.The Masters is to come in January, when we’ll toast fifty years of the sport’s premier invitational event in that raucous arena at London’s Alexandra Palace.Then we’ll gather once more in Sheffield next spring for the Crucible spectacular that quite rightly obsesses us all.But first it’s to York for the UK Championship, which starts on Saturday. A week that cures all snooker’s ills. Well, most of them anyway.The plain truth is that for much of the British public, this will be the first snooker they’ve watched since Wilson sank the decisive pots to clinch his world title in May.I wish that weren’t the case. A small and merry band of us snooker journalists continue to do our best to sell the old table game whatever the weather.But it’s just reality. And a large part of the reason for that is that this will be the first live snooker on the BBC since that Crucible climax.And there’s pure history at play here too. The UK Championship has been on our screens at this time of year since the 1970s.Older viewers will recall Alex Higgins coming from miles behind to beat Steve Davis for the title and that scarcely believable Willie Thorne missed blue. They’ll likely wax lyrical about Stephen Hendry seeing off Davis in a final that symbolised a changing of the guard, or Ronnie O’Sullivan winning his first ranking event at the age of 17.Younger watchers will have their own treasure trove of memories too. A young Stephen Maguire storming to glory. An emotional John Higgins fighting back from the brink to deny Williams. Neil Robertson edging out Trump at one o’clock in the morning in an empty room, in the midst of a global pandemic. And all the way through to last year, when the redoubtable O’Sullivan beat Ding to claim his eighth UK crown.Not that history means everything. Some tournaments that have started up in the last five or ten years have already built up fearsome reputations. But it still counts for a lot, and undoubtedly helps to give the UK Championship a status and gravitas all of its own.I argued in a Sporting Life column last autumn that the UK should go back to having longer semi-finals – something I still believe – but putting that aside, there’s no doubt that the creation of Judgement Day and ensuring the top 16 go straight to the main stages has sprinkled the event with a little more of its old stardust.Book your seat on the sofa. These tournaments are there to be savoured. Let the UK Championship entrance us once more.Snooker fans spoilt rotten by these television feastsI’ve just had a look through the television schedules and I make it nearly 80 hours of coverage to come on the BBC from the UK Championship. Let me spell that out. Eighty hours.We can all be pretty demanding at times, us sports fans, but I do have to raise my eyebrows when I see snooker watchers complain that this match or that match isn’t being streamed. Honestly, we’re spoilt rotten as fans of this sport. Beyond all recognition really.At the Champion of Champions last week, the ITV team went on air at lunchtime and were still there at close to midnight some days, with just a short break for tea. Meanwhile, on Eurosport we’ve come to expect live action morning, noon and night from tournaments throughout the year and across the world.Some sports would kill for even a quarter of the coverage snooker enjoys on television.That’s not to say there should be any complacency here. If the TV time given to snooker starts to seriously dip in the years to come, I’ll be speaking out with the best of them.But right now, it’s a golden time for telly watchers. Now, where’s that bloody remote control?