Neil Robertson: ‘From job centre to playing on TV was just amazing’

“These are the things that made me a really strong person and competitor,” Neil Robertson says in a secluded corner of a snooker club in Cambridge.

The amiable Australian is ranked as the third best snooker player in the world, but Robertson has spent a chunk of the afternoon showing me how many empty glasses he could carry when working as a bus-boy in a Melbourne pub, what it felt like to be unemployed and how his career was almost derailed for three years when he struggled to help his wife cope with mental-health issues.

Robertson has won the three biggest tournaments of the year so far, and he enters the world championship, which starts in Sheffield on Saturday, as the favourite. But as a few stray punters around us line up their shots and add to the soft click and rustle of balls being missed or potted, Robertson also details the prejudice that international players endure on tour.

Before then, Robertson takes me back almost 20 years to a sultry Melbourne day. He had returned from a failed first crack at making it as a professional snooker player in England, when he had been miserable while living in Leicester during a dark winter, and he was unemployed. “I said to my mum and dad: ‘What am I going to do?’ My dad was like: ‘Go to the job centre.’ I dragged myself there and the queue was full of people struggling mentally or personally. To get your weekly dole cheque you had to prove you’d applied for jobs. The guy in front of me came up with all kinds of crazy excuses and he was told he was not getting his dole cheque. He was screaming and insulting the woman behind the counter so he got told to leave. I turned around and went home.

“I was thinking: ‘Is this it? Is this my destiny?’” Robertson found work in a pub. “I