Bustle in Belfast suggests time is right for Irish Masters revival

The World Snooker Tour rolled into Belfast last week off the back of the biggest ever crowd at a live match, culminating in Mark Allen's victory last night.

Earlier this month, 9,000 people packed into the Hong Kong Coliseum to see Ronnie O'Sullivan defeat Marco Fu in the final of the Hong Kong Masters. The previous record crowd stood at around 3,000, also in Hong Kong in 2017, while that number in Britain is around 2,500 for the Masters in London.

Back to Europe, and the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, where just over a thousand paid in to see the final yesterday. This is the seventh year in a row that the tournament has been included on the tour, although the 2020 event did take place in Milton Keynes owing to the pandemic.

Professional snooker also visited the city in the mid-2000s for three years. The tournament in Belfast is a favourite amongst players on the tour, but what are the chances of an event coming south again in the future?

The last event in the Republic was in 2013, when the Tour Championship Grand Final came to the Bailey Allen in Galway.

Before that, professional tournaments here visited various venues across the country, from the Helix at DCU to the Citywest Hotel and, perhaps the most celebrated of them all, at Goffs, where the Irish Masters was staged for over 20 years.

The modern WST events - with 128-players heading to the venue and the need for a minimum three-table set-up - mean that the county Kildare venue wouldn't realistically be able to host a tournament nowadays.

With Asia able to provide massive audiences and with competition from elsewhere in Europe - Germany, Gibraltar, Malta, Latvia and Turkey have all hosted events in recent years - how likely are we to see an event elsewhere on the island over