Barry Hearn is pleased that snooker fans are getting a bit of the ‘crash, bang, wallop’ rivalry of other sports in the form of the feud between Ronnie O’Sullivan and Hossein Vafaei.
The Rocket and the Prince of Persia meet in the second round at the Crucible, starting on Friday, and it looks set to be a spicy affair.
Vafaei began the beef ahead of last year’s World Championship when he said O’Sullivan should retire because he is bad for snooker.
It appeared that the rivalry had simmered down over the last year, but the world champion mentioned the comments after his first round win and warned other players not to ‘rattle his cage’.
The Iranian has not taken his advice and instead has chosen to give his cage a serious rattling, saying O’Sullivan is a ‘nice person when he’s asleep’ and claimed the Rocket’s illness during round one was just an excuse.
It has made the last 16 clash must-see television over three sessions from Friday to Sunday and, unsurprisingly, Matchroom Sport president Hearn is all for it.
‘Listen, I love a good show, I love it,’ he said. ‘There are boundaries obviously, of course.
‘Every sport has got its own personality and snooker isn’t really a crash, bang, wallop, “I’m going to whack you” type sport. Pool is much more crash, bang, wallop. Darts is. Boxing is boxing, which can be fabulous and can be scurrilous.
‘But I think it’s a bit of fun for all our snooker fans to have a little edge into that world of one-to-one confrontation that seems to mean something more than just a second round match in the World Championships.
‘There’s a little bit of needle, a little bit of pride and they’ll both by trying their absolute nuts off.’
The rivalry has been discussed across the Hearn family, with Barry’s son Eddie saying he would be relishing the war of words in the boxing world.
‘I was talking about it with Eddie yesterday, said Barry. ‘He said, “if this was a boxing match I would be smashing this up! Face-offs, all sorts of stuff.” So we’ll see.’
The match begins on Friday afternoon and continues in the Saturday afternoon session, finishing on Sunday morning.
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