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Janie's Snooker Scene Archive Essential Net Guide to The World Championship [Snooker Scene - April 1999] With April upon us, all eyes are turning towards Sheffield and The World Championship, the culmination of the Snooker Season. The demand for information from around the World is incalculable. For several months now, websites and the Newsgroup have been bombarded with questions asking how and where to book tickets, as the Global fans plan their annual pilgrimage to The Crucible. For those fans lucky enough to have secured a precious ticket, their first step will be to plan their trips to Sheffield, book their accommodation and check out the other sights and services available when they get there. For travel arrangements and hotel bookings, the internet provides countless sites where you can book online. You are able to browse through hotels, their locations, prices and facilities. A typical site would be the AA at http://www.theaa.co.uk/hotels/index.html. Having reached Sheffield you will want to familiarise yourself with your new surroundings and find the best pubs, nightclubs and restaurants. Sheffield is well served with web sites of one sort or another devoted to the city. There is a large site maintained by Sheffield University, which contains comprehensive information about the city and its facilities, including a page linked to The Crucible itself. http://www.shef.ac.uk/city/theatres/crucible/. The other main sources of information, which will, according to your age group and social preferences, give you useful facts and figures are Sheffield Tourist Guide http://www.demon.co.uk/dayco/tourist.html, Sheffield Web at http://www.sheffweb.co.uk, which will also link you to the local Sheffield Newspapers, who give special coverage to the World Championship and a well laid out site maintained by a local Sheffield school www.rmplc.co.uk/eduweb/sites/stmaryswalkley. If you're planning some serious "pubbing" on your trip then you need to visit http://www.sheffieldscene.co.uk/pubs.html which will give you an in depth guide to the pubs, their character, entertainment, beers etc. If you are unable to get to Sheffield, but still want to feel part of the action, then what you need is a picture of the Crucible, right there on your desktop. Several of the sites have pictures of The Crucible itself, one for instance is http://www.buss.co.uk/dayco/crucible.jpg. When you have loaded the picture into your browser, all you need to do is "right click" with your mouse, and choose the option "set as wallpaper". Only the lucky few will actually get to Sheffield to watch the action live, so the rest of us will be anxiously scouring the web looking for results, information about the players, reports on the matches, the media coverage and so on. The obvious first port of call to look for essential information was the WSA's own website at www.worldsnooker.com. The WPBSA's have had this site "up" since last November, but regrettably, after a thorough search through the pages available, I was unable to yield much information of any use whatsoever. The site loads extremely slowly, and most of it, having loaded, yields the scant information that the page is under construction. There is a useful page containing the rules of snooker and billiards, and a helpful button telling you to "click to print", but be warned if you do, you will be printing 28 pages! An easier way to retrieve the Rules is to "highlight" the entire document and copy it to your own word processor and format it yourself. This is what one of the Newsgroup members did, producing a very handy two column handbook, only about 6 pages in length. You can also ignore the WSA's Calendar of Events, because for some obscure reason, they have missed half the season's dates off! There appear to be no events between 15th December and 23rd March! With my phone bill mounting at an alarming rate I clicked onto the Ranking List for the season. This looked far more promising, with a start ranking list for every professional and an option to click on the players name for a profile. Oops! Not much more luck here. I started with number one John Higgins and found a full profile, and one for Stephen Hendry. But World No. 3 Ronnie O'Sullivan remains a man of mystery to his Association. No profile, not even a date of birth or nationality, so bad luck to Ronnie fans there! Out of 500 plus professionals, I managed to find three further profiles, of Steve Davis, Ken Doherty and Dave Harold, who, alas, didn't merit a photograph, he appears as a blue spinning WSA logo! So, if the WSA is no help, where are we going to get the information we are after. It must be the sponsor's site - and yes, bonanza time, Embassy have put up a superb site called Embassy Snooker, http://www.embassysnooker.com/ with some "standing" pages of information and background, and regularly updated pages of the latest news (pertaining to their events!). Particularly useful is their Ranking List Information. It was slightly out of date, (a tournament behind), but gave you the option to click for different views, such as the current one year list, to check out who's the form horse for the season - Mark Williams. There is a lot more interesting background data available, including behind the scenes at The Crucible, how the tv gets from them to us, the Heritage Room with Roger Lee. There are also profiles of all the players who have had a recent Crucible appearance and this is one of the few places you will find information on some of the game's "lesser lights" such as Simon Bedford for instance. There is a page of WPBSA facts and figures - a fascinating bit of "chest banging", no doubt supplied by a media writer at Bristol and a page devoted to Ladies Snooker, whose World Championship will be taking place, largely unheralded at Sheffield at the same time as the men. You can have a go at the Trivia Quiz - I failed miserably on the name of Dennis Taylor's dog! If you fancy yourself at trick shots, then John Virgo's page has some set ups for you to try yourself. While the Championship is being played and we are stuck moaning behind our work desks, we are going to need to access up to the minute results and information and there will be a few sites that will prove invaluable. It would be unfair to list them in any order of merit, but your essential links will include www snooker, which will not only have up to date results, but is the biggest snooker site in the world with all the past results, player profiles, in fact anything you need to know about snooker: http://www.stud.ifi.uio.no/~hermunda/Snooker/. For pictures and reports straight from The Crucible visit Eric Whitehead's site at www.snoookerimages.co.uk where you can see Eric's superb photographs and read John Dee's up to the minute reports and interviews. The media will give the event major coverage, with daily reports in all the online newspapers. Up to the minute news can be accessed on The Sporting Life site at www.sporting.life.com and also worth book marking will be Line One's specialist snooker coverage. Last year they included player profiles written by Steve Davis and they also cover The Ladies Snooker and have now set up a Snooker "club" with results, profiles, news and rankings at http://www.lineone.net/clubs/sport/snooker/. One other stop off point will be The Global Snooker Centre - the Snooker Newsgroup at news:alt.sport.snooker, where fans, players and officials from all over the world will be giving vent to their views throughout the event! GSC also has a linked website at www.globalsnookercentre.co.uk, which has a collection of links to sites featuring the players. The site also features Ladies Snooker, Billiards, the Fan's own page, Terry Griffiths School of Coaching and pictures and profiles of some of the Newsgroup participants.
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