Ronnie O’Sullivan is enjoying playing snooker again, feeling an upturn in performances from last season, partly down to some advice from 12-time women’s world champion Reanne Evans.
The last campaign was one to forget for the Rocket as he struggled for results and to reach anything like the immense standard he is capable of.
His frustrations boiled over in January when he snapped his cue and then pulled out of a number of tournaments, including the Masters.
He returned at the World Championship in April and made the semi-finals, but still wasn’t finding top form and was hammered 17-7 in the last four by eventual champion Zhao Xintong.
After a summer off, including moving to Dubai, O’Sullivan’s game looks to be heading in the right direction, reaching the Saudi Arabia Masters final where he narrowly lost to 10-9 to Neil Robertson.
The semi-finals of that event in Jeddah saw the Rocket knock in two 147s in his win over Chris Wakelin, so the magic is certainly back in the new cue he is playing with this season.
O’Sullivan also credits a comment from legend of women’s snooker, Evans, who noted a change in his game which he has tried to put right and has helped rediscover some enjoyment for the sport.
‘Reanne Evans came up to me a year ago and she said, “you’re not the player you was”,’ O’Sullivan told greatinsports.com. ‘I was like, “what do you mean?”
‘She went, “well, you know, blah, blah, blah,” I won’t go into details, and I thought, okay, interesting, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it.
‘Then at Sheffield, she went, “yeah, you used to do this, you used to do that.” I was thinking, really?
‘But I started looking at old videos and it’s not even a technique thing, it was more how I went about my approach to the shot and that sort of stuff. And she was right and I was like…wow!
‘So I’ve tried to sort of unlearn that. It’s not easy, but I feel like I’m on the right track and I feel like I’m just devoting all my time to snooker now, and as a consequence, I feel better on the practice table.
‘I feel like I want to go to tournaments, I feel like I wish I could have gone to Brentwood, I wish I could have gone to play in Wuhan. I wish I could do them all because I’m enjoying playing, which is great.’
O’Sullivan is yet to win a title this campaign, and hasn’t lifted a trophy since the World Masters of Snooker in March 2024, but he feels he is playing at a level again which means success will likely follow.
The double-147 exhibition of brilliance against Wakelin was the standout, but he feels he has been good throughout his Shanghai Masters and Saudi campaigns so far.
‘That was just a great performance, but I thought I played great in the final, I thought I played very well against [Kyren] Wilson in Shanghai,’ he said. ‘I think every match I’ve played this year has been good.
‘I’ve played seven matches and I’ve played seven good matches whereas when I won them five tournaments in that season [2023/24], I might have played seven good matches in the whole year!
‘So that’s always been the most important thing to me, you know, the result has always been secondary. But it’s nice to get a few results and play well.’
The Rocket confirms his schedule this season
O’Sullivan will be at the Xi’an Grand Prix next week as he looks to continue the good form he has shown, followed by the International Championship in Nanjing and then the UK Championship in York before the end of the year.
‘I’ll be doing the China one, which is Xi’an,’ he said. ‘Hopefully I’ll be doing the Nanjing one in China and hopefully I’ll be doing the UK championships. That’s the plan anyway.’
However, he told talkSPORT that he may not play the Masters in January as he keeps his travelling and playing schedule light.
‘I probably won’t play the Masters this year,’ he said. ‘I think I’m just going to play the UK Championship, hopefully the Tour Championship if I’ve done enough, which I think I have because I did well in Saudi.
‘Then the World Championship, it would be nice to win that one more time before I snap another cue.’
Why the move from the UK?
The seven-time world champion is not playing a lot in the UK after his move to Dubai with wife Laila Rouass, which he is thoroughly enjoying.
‘I really like it, to be honest, it’s just made life a lot more simple, straightforward,’ he said. ‘For work, obviously, I’m working a lot that way anyway, so I don’t suffer really with jet leg and my flights are cut down in half. So, yeah, all around, it’s just makes life so much easier.
‘The dogs are there, all set up with a house, all the furniture just moved out, so everything’s all done. We’ve sold up virtually everything I had in the UK, so, yeah, nothing left there now for me, really.’
The Rocket is not the only player to make the move to Dubai, with Judd Trump and Matt Selt doing the same and O’Sullivan says they all now practice in the same place.
‘We all play in the same facility,’ he said. ‘It’s one of the best practice facilities I’ve ever had. Great, great set-up there. And the people there are amazing. I couldn’t have had it any better, really.
On what pushed him to make the move from Essex to Dubai, he said: ‘I think it was a few things really. The only time I enjoyed being in the UK was when I was I was on the road travelling, do you know what I mean? I used to travel a lot and then I’d come home and, especially where I live, it was always congested, lots of traffic. So in the end, I didn’t really venture out.
‘That was fine because obviously I was working and when I come home, it’s nice to be home, but I wanted to get out a bit as well.
‘It just made everything much more straightforward to get away. It just feels like I’ve got more time, more to do all the things I want to do.’
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