Larry Ryan: Maybe it's not cheating to just get the highlights

England's Stuart Bingham in action during the World Snooker Championship 

Sadly, you are not dealing today with a man at peace. Your correspondent has not properly observed the annual pilgrimage, has not fully given himself up to the sacred rituals of Crucible fortnight.

We decided last year  that it is a gross betrayal of your own well-being not to take your holidays during this 17-day ‘marathon of the mind’.

Last August’s displaced festival fell nicely for some — and those of us who could immerse ourselves were probably drawing on its recuperative properties well into the latest lockdown.

You need to be investing six hours daily, minimum, during what should be a period of deep contemplation. Not that the constraints of time will have any meaning as the end game approaches.

By this third Saturday, you ought to be perfectly in tune with the rhythms. Lockdown or not, you will have nowhere to go or nothing to do more important than working out whether that brown on the side cushion will be needed.

And you will find yourself wondering if Kyren Wilson isn’t being a touch hasty if he’s down on the shot inside 30 seconds.

These are the days when disciples of the baize are operating at a higher level. By now fully tuned into their senses, instantly detecting any heavy contact, hearing the heavens open with every ‘thunderous kick’.

Regrettably, having booked no holidays, I have only dipped in and out this year. And during the early knockings of the first session of Thursday’s semi-final, lack of match fitness was jarringly obvious.

Over on Eurosport, Joe Johnson was registering his alarm as a long slow safety from Mark Selby drifted marginally off course. The Jester might have been only a few millimetres off, yet Joe was gasping in panic as if he had yanked the steering wheel into oncoming traffic.

The untrained observer would go on to witness, on the face of it, a leisurely afternoon’s play. But maybe you needed to have put in the hours to entirely appreciate what a madhouse it was, the lads sometimes drifting whole centimetres out of position as they battled with ‘soft cushions’ and a ‘crazy cueball’.

At the interval, the match referee tried to usher in some sanity by having the cloth brushed and throwing in a new white. And those watching who had earned the right could be at peace again in this orderly world.

Sad thing is, we always come back to a familiar problem with the snooker. That today’s attention spans are not ideally suited to matters being settled across 30-odd frames over four sessions. It is noticeable that stairlift manufacturers CareCo are sponsoring Eurosport’s coverage, which might offer some clues about the demographic watching.

It’s probably not the crowd Andrea Agnelli and Florentino Perez have in mind when they organise a Super League to cater for the folk playing Call of Duty or Fortnite who, they tell us, are ‘easily distracted’.

That modern life sure comes at you fast was emphasised this week when Johnny Palmer’s new fancy woman in Summer Bay was exposed so soon as a con artist who had emptied his accounts. Not too long ago, that plotline might have taken a year to play out. We’d still be at the sweet nothings phase rather than the knocking-out-Irene with-chloroform-and-going-on-the-run stage.

And sure enough, I see even some of the snooker devotees putting the dangerous theory out there that three days to decide a semi-final might be tearing the arse out of it a small bit, in this day and age.

This generation’s veneration of live sport means it feels like cheating to steal your fix of drama via a nighttime highlights package. There’s a gnawing sense you simply cannot tune into the frequency unless it’s live.

At the same time, isn’t it true that’s how many of us fell in love with snooker?

When it was all respotted blacks and total clearances and comebacks from three snookers down, with the odd safety battle thrown in to keep us guessing.

Most of the boring bits airbrushed out by David Icke noting that ‘Hendry took three of the next four’.

And many before us were hooked when all you needed of snooker was what could be squashed into one half-hour for Pot Black.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that some of us have been alive to witness this great change in how we consume sport. That there wasn’t always this high premium on ‘and it’s live’.

Mainly of course it is the live soccer that has colonised our time. The great Declan Lynch of the Indo operates by a simple enough maxim: That you should never not watch a match. And it is hard to dispute the suitability of this credo as a guiding principle in life.

And yet, there were precious few live matches to watch on television when Declan and myself were at the age when Fortnite would probably have come strongly into contention if it had been around.

But no doubt Declan, like myself, found other ways to enjoy the bit of soccer. Whether it was the wireless or Match of the Day or just traipsing around the town looking at teletext through shop windows.

It struck me this week that I seem to be providing some kind of alert service for the nippers, during these Champions League weeks. They might be gone to bed, or glued to Teen Titans or Gumball, when I summon them for a goal, or a penalty, or the odd glaring miss, just to keep them guessing.

Am I spoiling them, I wonder, by providing this rich diet of drama, with none of the chaff to endure? Or am I offering a glimpse of an alternative way of life? Where they have it all. A different kind of peace.

I was reminded of the words of Michael Lyster last year when we discussed the glory days of Sports Stadium.

Michael felt it might even have been the sweet spot, for many sports, that 20 minutes of handball or hockey or rallying highlights once a week. That any more was too much. And that people only lost interest in these sports once they could have it all, somewhere on the box.

It turns out Brendan O’Reilly and the lads, all those years ago, were speaking the language of the great restless innovators like Agnelli and Perez, who’d like to sell you the last 15 minutes of Super League matches.

Could things ever come full circle, I wonder?