It is commonly known these days as the Luke Littler effect. A teenage phenomenon bursting on to the scene and almost becoming a bigger force of nature than the sport he or she was born to succeed in. But while darts is only experiencing that boom now, snooker has tasted this sensation before.
In the 1990s, it was Ronnie O’Sullivan’s arrival on the baize as a teenager that revitalised snooker’s fortunes in the UK. In the mid-2000s, Ding Junhui’s emergence led to the explosion of the game in China – which has just produced its first world champion in the shape of Zhao Xintong, one of millions who was inspired to pick up a cue by Ding.
But it is not unreasonable to suggest that in the UK, snooker is in desperate need of its own Luke Littler effect once again. The sport still relies heavily on players such as O’Sullivan – who turns 50 this year – for mainstream attention. There have been moments, but nothing in the way of a seismic shifting of British snooker’s tectonic plates.
Perhaps that is where Halifax’s Stan Moody comes in. Like Littler, Moody was obsessed with his sport of choice from a young age, after picking up a cue to play pool as a nine-year-old on a family holiday. And like the darts prodigy, he has already enjoyed immense success belying his years, turning professional at 16 and winning national championships at under-14, under-16 and under-18 level.
Impressively, Moody retained his tour card at the end of last season despite only being 18 and this week he enjoyed the best run of his career so far, reaching the quarter-finals of the Wuhan Open. Along the way he beat Ding and Barry Hawkins to pick up a cheque for £16,000. “I’ve made a lot of progress, I feel so much better under pressure now,” Moody says.
He is now climbing the rankings and has already been tipped for big things by Jimmy White. The challenge for snooker? Selling this story and achieving a similar ripple effect to the one darts has enjoyed with Littler; not so much at the elite level, but at grassroots, with more youngsters playing darts than ever before in the wake of his rise.
“It’s a wonderful story,” Jason Ferguson, the chair of the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, says. “Not every child wants to play football in England or rugby. He fell in love with cue sports at nine, which I can relate to myself. Nine is very young to have got really hooked on it and now he’s knocking on the door of the very elite end of the sport.”
But perhaps it was fitting that Moody’s best run of his burgeoning career to date came in China, where the sport has now left the UK behind.
There are more than 300,000 snooker halls across the country, it is on the national curriculum and most of the sport’s premier up-and-coming talent is Chinese. Moody is an outlier; so how does snooker change that?
“It needs help from the government,” Moody’s father, Nigel, explains. “Stan just happened to pick up a cue by luck. There’s only really been Ronnie in the last 30 years outside of that who’s made such a huge impact. If you got every child in a school to pick up a cue, how many Stans could there be out there?
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“It’s got to get into schools. In China they’ve been doing that for 20 years.” Moody himself says. “In China it’s really different to at home. They’re obsessed with it.”
Ferguson has long spoken of his desire to get snooker recognised more in the UK – but he is hopeful that a breakthrough talent like Moody will start to make more people notice. “For me it’s a great thing to see a young man from England providing that inspiration,” he says. “He will inspire another generation. He’s been on the BBC, and moving to this new level in his career, he can help people pay attention to snooker. It just takes one. We opened an Asian academy in 1999 and I remember Ding walking through the door.
“You need big stars in a sporting market and there’s no doubt Stan is becoming one of those names people will follow. Look at the confidence it can hopefully put into juniors in snooker. He’s in the top 64 players in the world and rising, and beating big names on a regular basis now.”
But that is a problem for Ferguson and snooker’s authorities, not for the undeniably talented Moody, who is looking upwards and aiming to take more big scalps over the coming months. “This tournament has confirmed what I can do, but I want to go further and do that in every tournament and hopefully win one,” he says.
The talent is there, and the Yorkshire teenager is clearly set for a bright future. The question is whether snooker as a whole can find a path to take full advantage of Moody’s potential and position him as a star the sport can build around for years to come.
