Chatting Bull with Dan Dawson - Issue #007


What price heritage? I ask because I have been watching the debate around the World Snooker Championship potentially leaving its long-standing home at The Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. Some players seem to feel the sport has outgrown the venue, and a similar case could easily be made in our own sport for the World Matchplay to leave Blackpool Winter Gardens.


Tickets for the Matchplay last year could have been sold twice over, the practice room and facilities in Blackpool are not exactly top of the range, and it is famously (potentially match-affectingly) hot. Yet it looks amazing, the sheer weight of its incredible history, and the proximity of the fans to the stage, are all things that could be lost if it moved somewhere else.
Does that matter? I think it does. The psychogeography of the place, walking in and knowing that this is where Colin Lloyd won with a 170 finish, or where Phil Taylor won his last major title, carries a Huge value in my eyes.
Maybe it's irrelevant: while the PDC obviously want to maximise ticket sale revenue, the money made is dwarfed by TV rights money. It is that which is the main driver behind most broadcast sports. Remember though, if demand for a ticket at the Matchplay continues to grow, but the supply does not, that could well push ticket prices up. Fans that want to maintain the romance of staying at a tournament’s ancestral home may well end up having to pay for it.
This has already happened in darts, of course. Alexandra Palace has become synonymous with the World Championship, and is now an annual pilgrimage for fans from all over the world (more than a quarter of tickets sold go to punters from mainland Europe). It only moved from The Circus Tavern in 2008 though, after being staged in Essex for the first 14 years of its existence. It was necessary for the sport to make the move, but it undoubtedly lost something in the short term - especially with the last ever World Championship there ending with the famous clash between Taylor and Barneveld.


The intervening years have seen new stories told, and “Ally Pally” create its own sense of history and identity. It has become part of the fabric and the lore of the sport, and walking into the venue on the opening day of a World Championship immediately evokes the memories from all those great nights there. Given time, any venue could do it - Arsenal left Highbury, and while it was not widely popular at the time, The Emirates appears pretty well regarded nowadays.
Would moving the snooker or the Matchplay somewhere twice the size make sense? Financially, maybe. And in time, wherever they went would likely forge their own identities. But speaking personally, it would take an awful long time to feel at ease with a Matchplay that were not held there - the place where Phil Taylor left as big a mark on darts as any man did to any sport.
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Issue #007 Quiz Answers
1) Belfast
2) Mickey Mansell
3) Michael Smith
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