Ronnie O’Sullivan has named the snooker player he would most like to coach, but admitted he would be “scared” to change any facet of his game. The Rocket revealed that he nearly pulled out of the upcoming World Championship in order to mentor a young player, while his participation at the Crucible is still in doubt.
The seven-time world champion will decide in the days leading up to the April 19 start date whether he will play in the first round. He has not competed professionally since January and withdrew from a number of high-profile events due to medical reasons. But with one eye perhaps on his future after hanging up his cue, O’Sullivan appears very open to a coaching role. He pondered mentoring a young player at the Crucible alongside punditry duties for TNT Sports, should the Essex-born potter skip the 2025 event.
And he named Luca Brecel, the 2023 world champion, as the one player he would want to work with. But O’Sullivan is afraid to “touch him” and risk jeopardising the talent that the Belgian Bullet possesses.
“I think Luca Brecel’s an interesting case,” O’Sullivan told TNT Sport. But I’m not sure he’s somebody that you could coach really, in many ways. I think he’s pretty much got all the game, but with someone like Luca, you’d be scared to touch him because he’s such a natural talent.
“But I think there are some little areas where he could maybe improve his consistency levels. Instead of playing lights-out snooker for 20 per cent of the year, he could play lights-out snooker for 10 per cent of the year, but then his middle game becomes a lot stronger.
“I believe someone like him is so talented that he doesn’t need to play brilliantly to win. So he’d be an interesting case. It would be someone that I think has the talent and the game but maybe is just under-performing. I don’t know who I would like to work with, but it would certainly be interesting to look at who’s about and see if I could work with someone.”
Brecel has proven to be an enigma since beating Mark Selby just two years ago in a thrilling Sheffield showpiece, opting against training and living in the UK, while coming in for some strong criticism from Stephen Hendry.
And O’Sullivan would ask Brecel for five months of the year to work hard at improving his snooker game, offering the remaining seven to let the 30-year-old loose.
He added: “I think with Luca, it’s very difficult for him to just focus on living the life of a snooker player. And I totally get it, he lives in Belgium and it’s a tough ask to keep leaving, going home, leaving.
“I’d just say to him: ‘Look, give me four or five months of the year where you totally devote yourself to snooker. You do your three or four hours practice every day, you do your gym, you do whatever, you do your tournaments. But just give me that.’
“And then for the rest of it, if you want to play, play, if you don’t, you don’t – no problem. But I think as long as he could just focus for that intense period of time – he’s okay to take time out, he doesn’t need to play every day.
“But you have to have spells where you’re on it. With someone like Luca, he doesn’t have to be on it all the time, he just needs one good training camp a year, where he’s practising and playing a lot of events, and that could be September, October, November, December.
“And I’d say come January, just pick and choose what you want to do, you don’t have to play every tournament, but for that first start of the season, really go at it hard and give it everything, and I think that would be a wise way for him to approach it in many ways.”