Text 1: Nine hundred people holding their breath, by Ritu Bassi

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

The first thing that strikes you at a live snooker match is the silence. Nine hundred people sit in the dark of an old theatre, and when a player bends over the table you can hear the hum of the lights above it. Somebody unwraps a sweet in row K and the noise is so loud that half the audience turns round to glare.

I had only ever watched snooker on television, late at night, half asleep. In the room it is a different game. The table is startlingly green under its canopy of lamps, the balls glow like boiled sweets, and the referee, in waistcoat and white gloves, moves around it as quietly as a waiter in an expensive restaurant. The players do not speak. They sit in their chairs, sip water and wait, and the waiting is part of the drama.

In the third frame, with his opponent already on sixty-eight points, a twenty-two-year-old ranked well outside the top fifty began a break. Red, black. Red, black. Red, pink. Each pot was greeted by nothing louder than a soft murmur and the dry click of the referee replacing the colour on its spot. After twenty minutes he had scored ninety, and the audience had more or less stopped breathing. You could see his hands, perfectly steady until then, begin to tremble as he chalked his cue.

Then, on a pink that I could have potted myself, he missed. The ball rattled in the jaws of the pocket and stayed out. A groan rose from every corner of the theatre, and the young man sat down very slowly and stared at the floor. His opponent, a veteran with three world titles, walked to the table without any change of expression and won the frame.

At the end of the session both players were applauded for a long time. The young man shook hands, smiled bravely and walked off with his cue case under his arm. I have seen plenty of exciting sport. I have rarely seen anything as tense as a man trying to pot a ball while nine hundred people hold their breath, or anything as quietly cruel as watching it go wrong.

Text 2: The great billiard match, by Our Sporting Correspondent

An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this newspaper report, published in 1885, a correspondent describes the final evening of a professional billiards match played in a London hall.

The match of three thousand points up between Mr Gilbert Saunders, the champion, and his young challenger, Harry Coombe, for a stake of two hundred pounds a side, was concluded on Saturday evening at the Albion Rooms, before an audience such as has seldom been seen at a billiard contest. Every seat had been taken by seven o’clock, and many gentlemen were content to stand at the back of the hall for upwards of four hours.

The play throughout the week had been close, and when the last evening began the champion held a lead of only ninety points. The hall was very warm, the gas burning brightly above the table, and the smoke of a hundred cigars hung in a blue cloud beneath the ceiling. Yet so perfect was the silence during the strokes that the click of the ivory could be heard in the farthest corner, and the marker’s voice, calling the score, seemed almost an intrusion.

At a little before ten o’clock young Coombe went to the table needing two hundred and forty to win, and the scene which followed will long be remembered by those who witnessed it. Stroke after stroke he played with a coolness astonishing in one so young, nursing the balls along the top cushion with the most exquisite delicacy of touch. At a hundred the audience began to cheer and were sternly hushed by the referee. At two hundred men were standing upon their chairs. When at last the winning stroke was made, the hall rose as one man, hats were waved in the air, and his supporters pressed about him until he could scarcely hold his cue.

The champion, it must be said, took his defeat hard. He sat motionless for some moments, very pale, then rose, bowed stiffly to the company and left the hall without a word, and it is rumoured that a good deal of money changed hands in the street outside. It is to be hoped that the game, too long associated with the public house and the betting man, may yet take its place among the respectable recreations of the age. A contest of such skill deserves better company.

Both of these texts are about watching professional matches of snooker and billiards.

Compare:

• what the writers say about watching the matches and the players
• how the writers create tension for readers

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