What did Steve Davis do to succeed at snooker? Everything his dad told him

Among the more intriguing insights into an election that seems to be taking longer than a Cliff Thorburn 50 break is the fact that Ed Miliband is a snooker fan. Which doesn’t mean he was a Steve Davis fan. Davis was ‘boring’, Miliband told the Guardian recently. The sentiment was widely shared during Davis’s 1980s heyday. Indeed, the writers of Spitting Image found him so dull they nicknamed him ‘Interesting’. Hence the hostage-to-fortune title of what is by my count Davis’s third volume of autobiography. Will the leader of the opposition find anything in the book’s turgidly ghostwritten pages to modify his opinion? One fears not. Yet if Interesting isn’t exactly unputdownable, nor is it unpickupable. If nothing else, the book makes clear what it was about Davis that so many people disliked.

Like everyone else only more so, snooker players can be divided into cavaliers and roundheads. A player so reliable that for the best part of the Thatcher decade he was odds-on favourite to win any tournament he contested, Davis fell squarely into the latter category. Alas for him, the majority in the snooker audience have no time for the care and caution with which the roundhead game is played. They prefer the cavaliers —romantic wrong ’uns of the Jimmy White and Alex Higgins variety who, like the average amateur, will never play safe when they can risk everything on a table-length double.

Davis is baffled by the adulation the cavaliers inspire. For one thing, how can the public prefer one player to another when they ‘don’t really know any of us’? More importantly, while the likes of White and Higgins are ‘outstanding’ shot-makers, outstanding shots don’t ensure victory. Nor do patience and planning and practice, of course.