For those of you who may not have seen it earlier today, good news coming from Dave Hendon at Snooker Scene Blog, who has revealed that this year’s Haikou World Open will be broadcast by ITV, marking their their return to ranking event snooker for the first time in 20 years.
With the BBC down to just three professional tournaments these days, it is important that snooker maintains its presence on terrestrial television and this can only help in that regard. As someone who writes a blog, for all of the tournaments in existence these days, the increased amount of interest when one of the terrestrial events is ongoing is noticeable, and hopefully this news will boost the level of interest in the World Open, in the UK at least.
It is also pleasing to see that Clive Everton and Neal Foulds will be among those commentating, arguably the two best commentators around at the moment, while Peter Drury, who has been involved with snooker in the past for ITV, will also be on hand.
A lot of people have been reminiscing over ITV’s previous coverage of ranking events in recent times, though for me, I can only really remember their coverage of the Nations Cup towards the end of the 1990’s, as the ‘dream team’ of Scotland did battle against the other home nations.
Times have changed since those days, but it is good to have ITV back on board, hopefully this will lead to even bigger things going forward…