“If I’m going to play like that, it’s pretty pointless,” said Ronnie O’Sullivan upon leaving the Crucible on Friday night and heading straight for the biggest crossroads of his life.
After gaining Hong Kong residency last year, and with the house he shared with Laila Rouass up for sale, he now intends to move to the Middle East where he will be close to the Saudi Arabian snooker academy established last year in his name. One snooker insider described the deal which Eddie Hearn helped broker with Saudi Arabian minister Turki Alalshikh as “like the pension of all time” for O’Sullivan.
“There’s going to be a few changes in my life, so I’ll see how that goes,” said O’Sullivan following what was his heaviest ever Crucible defeat. “I might be back in six months, who knows? I’ve got to figure out what my future looks like whether it’s playing or not. There’s a lot more important things in life to worry about than a game of snooker.”
After more than four months away from competitive snooker before arriving this year in Sheffield, O’Sullivan had repeatedly stressed that he wants to give his career at least two more years of dedicated effort. The manner of his defeat to Zhao Xintong – and losing 15 out of the final 18 frames – seemed, however, to prompt some reappraisal.
O’Sullivan has tried hard in recent weeks to rediscover something approaching his old touch but even 10 solid days of match practice seems to have left him even further adrift of answers. He has likened his struggles to the yips in golf and, while he did beat Ali Carter, Pang Junxu and Si Jiahui to reach the semi-finals, this all felt very different to previous World Championship exits.
“It’s just hard to get my head around it,” he said. “I can’t fix it, that’s the problem. I have lost what I used to have. I’m so confused. I didn’t know where the white ball was going. I don’t know how to correct the fault. That is the worrying thing. I am so far away – I don’t even know where to begin.”
Catastrophic self-assessments are, of course, nothing new for O’Sullivan and you do now wonder if the key to the sort of ending his career so deserves is to actually shift the focus away from technical shortcomings.
Being a perfectionist has previously driven O’Sullivan to unique heights in snooker but, at an age when some decline has become unavoidable, has it become counterproductive? An approach more in line with that adopted by Mark Williams, for example, would mean O’Sullivan would never have broken his cue in frustration at how he was playing against Robert Milkins in January.
They say never meet your heroes…
Well Zhao Xintong has just beaten his in the semi-final of the World Snooker Championship, this was how Ronnie O’Sullivan reacted. 💚#BBCSnookerpic.twitter.com/qEYezGttAm
— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) May 2, 2025
Such a mindset would also have meant finding positives from his run to a record 14th World Championship semi-final and sharing that first session 4-4 against Zhao. As it was, O’Sullivan promptly went to a snooker-cue shop in Sheffield on Thursday evening to have the tip and ferrule replaced ahead of the 16 frames they were scheduled to play on Friday.
The change was duly made and, having established a certain rhythm over the previous week whereby he could at least rely on tactical guile and trademark break-building that had yielded seven centuries, even those attributes were lost. O’Sullivan made just one break above 50 – a 57 in the 22nd frame – across two sessions of snooker on Friday. The gamble had backfired. And perhaps a better focus now would be working with trusted psychiatrist Steve Peters on how he can embrace the truly remarkable feat of still competing amongst the absolute elite, trust more to instinct, and not get quite so submerged in the inevitable flaws.
O’Sullivan is now in his 50th year and such longevity at the highest level of the sport is already preciously rare. Mistakes will happen. Increasingly so. But, as he showed even in making the last four, that does not mean you cannot still find ways to win the biggest tournaments.
Whether O’Sullivan can learn to live with that, a la Williams, will likely determine whether he should now play on in search of an unprecedented eighth world title.