TIPPING POINT:The sport may have its suspicious side but other codes should follow its example in how to indulge our better instincts

SNOOKER’S BOAST is that it is chess with balls. It is a self-regarding sobriquet and captures the snooker fans’ firm conviction that there is a cerebral aspect to the sport that fits hand-on-cue with the mental resilience required to be good at it.

There is also snooker’s reputation for being the perfect television sport, a boast that might have been apropos when colour telly was a novelty and the odds of a mistake at the table shrank in correspondence to the lateness of the evening and the quantities of vodka Alex Higgins and Jimmy White had consumed.

But those days are gone. Instead of Higgins’ twitchy, pigeon-toed stalking of the tables, there is now a ruthless, metronomic efficiency to the top players that has taken snooker to extraordinary levels of proficiency. For genuine snooker fans it must be bliss to watch: viewing figures suggest those of us less fanatically in thrall to the green baize are deserting in droves.

Rather like Test cricket, there is a mind-numbing rhythm to snooker that can leave one wondering where the previous couple of hours have gone. However with humanity’s attention span getting shorter and shorter, the sport appears to be remorselessly on the slide in terms of audience.

But snooker is still worth a look for one important aspect besides the skill involved to play it well, and that is the zealous adherence to the rules that every player still observes. Even the merest brush with a cue or a sleeve is admitted to immediately and without hesitation. Golf has the same thing but there’s a smugness to the way it congratulates itself about it which is not attractive.

Some of snooker’s most notable figures still manage to wear black tie as if out on day parole for a wedding, and there are persistent concerns about match-fixing that are a reminder of the sport’s inner-city-dive roots, but there is nothing artificial about the firm obedience of etiquette at the table.

And since match-fixing concerns are prevalent throughout sport – bookmakers reckon tennis, that most suburban of pursuits, is the most prone of all to set-ups – there remains something admirable about snooker players’ willingness to regulate themselves when it comes to the rules, and to be seen to do so.

Certainly the contrast such an attitude presents to top-flight soccer is painfully obvious. There are times when football referees appear to be as relevant to the top Premier League preeners as an ethic at an after-match roast. Rugby prides itself on being above such official abuse but there is an arbitrariness to how great swathes of obscure rules are enforced that make many situations a toss-of-the-coin job in terms of which team gets the benefit.

There is also a creeping willingness within the GAA to play the old soldier. Big, butch examples of Gaelic manhood are increasingly falling to the ground like Zulus at Rorke’s Drift in an affront to the memories of those macho heroes of yore who fought for the parish with nothing but the sly dig and a sharp elbow.

It all makes Páidí Ó Sé’s infamous left hook on Dinny Allen in a Munster final of long ago seem prehistoric in its straight-forward brutality. There is almost a nobility to the YouTube footage in which Dinny clouts Páidí on the side of the head and then stands there, arms at his side, posing his rival the challenge: “I dare you. Go on, I da . . . ”

But this more modern disregard for even the most fundamental rules is becoming all-consuming.

A recent dutiful piece of attendance at the fruit of my loins’ first appearance at an under-eights Gaelic football blitz was instructive in how pervasive this anarchic trend is becoming.

Even from the other end of the pitch it was easy to hear how one player felt about a particular decision that had incurred his displeasure. Despite the happy shrieks from the other games, it was possible to hear the embryonic “enfant terrible” burst into furious temper, loudly inform the referee he was a “c**t” and then gallop the length of the pitch using language suggestive of a navvy having just been released from Cistercian isolation.

This was under-eights, and just as surprising was the complete absence of surprise at this display from the referee or any of the beatific team officials. There was a tentative suggestion the little tearaway should have got a yellow card, a charitable gesture for behaviour more deserving of the young malcontent having his arse kicked before and after meals.

There’s a theory that any kind of behaviour is valid on a sports field because it is just a part of our humanity, that cheating might not be commendable but that it reflects an all too common urge within us. It is the kind of reasoning that suggests video analysis in football is not desirable because dodgy decisions are a lesson that so much in everyday life is dodgy, and unfair, and underhand, and that to pretend otherwise is artificial.

But by its very nature sport is artificial. What’s authentic about a scrum, or making dogs chase a teddy-bear, or putting padded gloves on for a fight, or doing a Fosbury Flop, or running endlessly around the same ring of artificial surface, or sticking a clothes-peg on your nose and pointing your toe out of a swimming pool, or clamping planks to your feet and pointing yourself off an Alp?

The glory of it all is its artificiality. Where else can some rather unrealistic concepts like fairness, the collective, merit being rewarded, and the winning line being a final and impartial arbiter gain currency? Sport’s great value is indulging these better instincts within us all. And none of that is really a runner when rules can be flouted with impunity.

A game was once defined as consisting of the rules by which it is played. There may be a whiff of sulphur surrounding snooker these days but it can still teach some supposedly more noble pursuits a thing or two.