Recipe for an unexciting snooker match

Ingredients

• One Peter Ebdon. This is by far the most important ingredient, and without it your snooker match runs a high risk of being entertaining.
• One Marco Fu. Can be replaced with another player, as long as they possess a slow, steady and not-especially-inspirational style of play.
• One snooker arena. Best to make it a little too cold, with hard plastic seats that are a little too close together. After all, you don't want your audience to fall asleep, which they would most likely do if it was warm, comfortable and they had plenty of space to sprawl.
• One commentary box containing Willie Thorne and John Virgo. This is the best combination as neither understand that it isn't necessary for commentators to be talking all the bleeding time. Willie Thorne could be substituted for Terry Griffiths on a bad day, but you would probably risk having the occasional insightful observation, which is not the kind of thing we are setting out to achieve here.

Method

• Combine all the above ingredients.
• Try to pay attention to the match.
• Fail, and spend the time thinking about what's for dinner instead.

I've been to the snooker a fair few times now, and yesterday's first round Masters match between the aforementioned Peter Ebdon and Marco Fu was by far the least enjoyable that I've seen. To be honest, I hadn't been particularly impressed by the morning’s game, in which a competent but nowhere-near-his-best Mark Selby completely demolished Ding Junhui 6-1. In comparison to the afternoon session however, this first match was snooker gold.

Now, I wasn't exactly expecting a cracker. Peter Ebdon isn't a name one would usually associate with thrilling play, and I can't help but view him as a money-grabbing tax-dodger since his move to Dubai, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Marco Fu is much less abrasive character-wise, coming across as a perfectly pleasant, polite young man, but again he doesn't exactly set off fireworks when he's at the table. And unhappily for everyone in the audience, the combination of these two led to an almost mind-numbingly dull first few frames.

Given that they are both meant to be top-16 snooker players, their play initially was appalling, and unfortunately Marco never really improved. Their pot success rates were rock bottom, their safety exchanges were painfully bad, and on occasion Ebdon seemed to go for the kind of 'just hit it really hard and hope' shot that I used to play when I was in a bad mood. After much agonising tit for tat between the players and precious little break building Marco took the first two frames, only to have Ebdon claw back the next two to leave them equal going into the mid-session interval.

I don't know if Ebdon used this break to have a strong cup of coffee or simply to give himself a good kick up the backside, but when they restarted he seemed to have remembered how to play. The next four frames all went his way, and he did even pull off the occasional shot that was really rather good. Alas, this resurgence was too late for me. My attention had already wandered; I tried to pull myself back into the match but failed miserably. All in all, it wasn't a bad day, and it certainly hasn't put me off going to see more snooker in the future, but I do think I will tend to avoid these two, especially if they're playing together...