Shaun Murphy: ‘What would I do without snooker? It’s my drug’

“M y wife says I should be in the corner of the room, dribbling away,” Shaun Murphy suggests with a smile as he revisits some tumultuous moments in his life which include violent bullying, becoming a snooker pro at 15, winning the world championship as a 150-1 outsider, bible-readings, a sex worker and tabloid exposé, divorce, estrangement from his father, depression, death threats, being called the Magician, obesity, surgery and a sudden resurgence of form in the game which consumes him.

We’re in the Crucible, that hushed and venerable site of the snooker world championships which have just begun in Sheffield. Murphy has reached four finals here, winning his first in 2005, and the world No 4 enters the tournament with the certainty that, in his words, “no one’s playing better snooker than me right now”.

Yet nothing is simple for the Magician. In his first round match, starting on Wednesday, Murphy plays Si Jiahui, the young Chinese player he lost to 18 months ago in the UK Championships. Si was an amateur then and Murphy ranted that “I have lost to someone who shouldn’t even be in the building”. He was abused and threatened and so Murphy’s law meant, as the 40-year-old says wryly, “it was inevitable” he would draw the 20-year-old Si this week.

The temptation to find a secluded corner of the Crucible and dribble helplessly, however, is resisted. “I may well be on my way there at some stage,” Murphy says with another grin, “but not yet.”

His love of snooker is obvious in the way he remembers how, on his first visit to the Crucible as a nine-year-old, he got his hero Steve Davis’s autograph. Thirteen years later, in 2005, Davis was one of the players Murphy brushed aside on his way to becoming a shock world champion who