With over 80 professional players set to compete during this weekend’s second Players Tour Championship Event I know that many fans will be keen to follow the action as it happens but unfortunately that will not be possible this weekend as the governing body have announced that live scores will not be running over at World Snooker for the foreseeable future…
A short news article over at WorldSnooker.com reads:
“Due to the volume of matches at the Players Tour Championship events, we will not be running live scoring on worldsnooker.com for the time being.
We will be providing latest results via the drawsheet as well as editorial reports throughout the event.
We will be relaunching in the Autumn with a much-improved service.”
This is far from a new issue, indeed the World Snooker website frequently fails to load during major tournaments, particularly those staged over in China and from the amount of emails that I receive and posts that I see over at TSF bemoaning the livescores service, I know that this is something that many fans feel strongly about.
As the story suggests however, hopefully with the much-vaunted new World Snooker website set to be launched in the near future we will also see an improved live scores service made available. Bearing in mind the problems that have beset the current system, reliability has to be the primary issue to address but given that the software has seen virtually no improvement in the last decade (indeed I remember being sat on a PC at college following the Hendry v Ford match at the 2005 Malta Cup on the current system!), it would also be nice to see a few new features added.
For example it would be nice to have an on-screen indicator as to how many reds are left on the table so we know whether or not snookers are needed by the chasing player. Or how about the plethora of statistics compiled by the BBC during the final stages of the major tournaments? You only have to look at the amount of stats available for tennis matches that are updated following every point to see that snooker is unfortunately lagging behind the times in this regard.
Or how about live commentary of matches, or at least a live commentary of the day overall such as this widely acclaimed piece, again from the tennis at Wimbledon. Anything to keep fans engaged with the sport and following the results must surely be encouraged and would help to bring the experience of being a snooker fan into the 21st century and in line with other top sports such as tennis and football.
How feasible these ideas may be is another question. Bearing in mind the fact that journalists attending the PTC events have been barred from interviewing more than three players at the event (according to Dave Hendon on Twitter), I won’t be holding my breath.
In the meantime, the best place to follow the latest scores from the PTC will no doubt be Global Snooker…