Ronnie O’Sullivan says winning one match at the World Snooker Championship this year would be a ‘huge victory’ for him, if he does choose to play at all.
The Rocket’s attendance at the Crucible is still in doubt after pulling out of a string of tournaments this season on medical grounds.
The 49-year-old snapped his cue at the Championship League in January, saying that he ‘lost the plot’ in Leicester, and has not played competitively since.
There remains hope that he will play in Sheffield as he has not missed a World Championship since his debut in 1993, but even if he does, he is not expecting much.
O’Sullivan says his form has not only been poor in the lead-up to his current break from competitive snooker, but for years and is nowhere near good enough to challenge for an eighth world title.
‘At the moment, I would be happy to win a match. If I turn up at Sheffield and I win a match, I would go “that’s a huge victory for me”. It really would be,’ O’Sullivan told The Sun.
‘I know I’ve got the talent and I know that it’s there but it’s just finding it. I haven’t found it for three or four years.
‘I had a spell in 2022 from January until the world championship where I won it and beat Judd Trump in the final and felt great.
‘Other than that, the last four years have been so appalling I’m not sure what to expect really.’
O’Sullivan is a perfectionist and even in his period of supposed struggle he has won a lot of games, picking up five titles just last season including the UK Championship and Masters.
However, he has regularly said how uncomfortable he feels with his game and his truly top form has been harder to find, often just coming out in short bursts of a few frames.
His break from playing goes beyond just form, though, as the Rocket works to get himself mentally ready to perform on the big stage again.’
The people who have been around me a lot can see what I’ve been going through,’ he explained. ‘They say, “Listen, you just take as much time as you need”.
‘There are people who know me but don’t see me a lot and don’t really know the full extent of it.
‘They are like, “oh, you have got to go and get the eighth, you’ve got to go and do this”. So, it’s hard to listen to that sometimes as it’s not that easy.’
The schedule for the World Championship has now been revealed, with O’Sullivan due to play a qualifier in the afternoon sessions of Tuesday 22 and Wednesday 23 April.
He has already announced that a decision on whether he will play is likely to be confirmed just before the tournament gets underway on Saturday 19 April.
Speaking earlier this month, he said: ‘I haven’t made my mind up, I’ll probably make a decision on maybe the 17th or 18th of April.
‘I’d love to be able to go there and play, I’d love to be able to have the confidence to be able to get my cue out and go and play snooker.
‘I just need to give myself as much time as possible to see where I’m at with it, and see whether it’s something I’m going to be able to do.’
O’Sullivan’s manager Jason Francis revealed that the Rocket appears to be happy with his new cue, but confirmed that a decision on playing is yet to be made.
‘He seems to have a cue that he’s happy with,’ Francis told the onefourseven podcast. ‘He is hitting balls. But he’s said nothing different to me than he has to everyone else. He will decide last minute on whether he wants to go.’
Retirement is certainly not on the agenda just yet, although it is not too far on the horizon, with his 50th birthday coming up in December.
‘I’m not quitting just yet, but I will give myself two years to try and figure it out,’ O’Sullivan told the Daily Mail.
‘I don’t want to finish my career feeling like I wasn’t really performing to the level that I know I can. I don’t have to win tournaments, but I just want to feel like I’m enjoying the game. I’d like to go out with a smile on my face.
‘I have to try and repair myself and just try and find how I used to play snooker. It’s a massive rebuilding process and probably the last one I’ll ever have to do as a snooker player.
‘Do I think I can do it? Probably not if I’m being honest. I think it’s probably a bit too late in my career and I’m probably damaged goods in the form of a snooker player. You take a lot of battle scars over the years. But I’m not prepared to quit at this point because I feel like I would be quitting on a bit of a low.’