The Seltephant in the Room
I want to address the Matt Selt situation. Here is a video, but brief summary, Matt lost his shit after losing a match. A lot has been discussed about the event's that night, and I'll get into those a bit, but mostly I want to talk about the reaction to it.
The next morning Matt was on Hendry's Cue Tips channel, in what seemed to be a pre planned appearance. They got into the incident right away and it was.....really bad. First, Hendry laughs about it as he brings it up, they both repeatedly refer to Atermijs Zizins as "the kid", Matt goes on about how badly Zizins missed his intended shot, implies that the official who he shouted "shut up!" at was out of order for calling him out, we find out that all the banging off camera was him smashing his cue case, destroying his cue. And what's Hendry's response? To laugh with him, excuse his abuse of the ref, and accept the excuses he made.
A week or so later, the incident is addressed on the OneFourSeven podcast. Shaun Murphy makes similar excuses and repeats Matt's line about it being his concession so it didn't really matter.
On both episodes, the topic of players showing more emotion came up. But I really wonder what the line would be if Selt had fluked match ball and Zizins had started crying? Or what if it was Mink? Hendry gave Muruphy shit for clapping for his opponent once, has talked about the need for a killer attitude. Has told the story a few times on his channel about his dad telling him to pick his head up when he was losing a match and had his head down in sorrow. So is it really that players should be more emotional or is it that saying that makes an excuse for Selt's behavior?
There is a big difference between being emotional and the level of anger shown by Matt here. One comes from a place of passion and dedication, the other from a sense of entitlement. Matt felt entitled to that match and to the position in other tournaments he lost by losing that frame. In the same way that Murphy threw a tantrum losing to Si when he was still an amateur, Matt felt that it was his opponents job to lose to him.
It's worth noting that in both circumstances, they lost to a player who is young and foreign. I highly doubt Shaun would have said that, and that Matt would have done that if it was Stan Moody. This is the intersection of toxic masculinity and racism and xenophobia.
We know that snooker had a gender problem. But players like Shaun and Hendry can pay all the lip service they want to women in snooker, but if they aren't backing it up by calling out toxic masculinity and excusing it 'cause he's a good bloke' then anything they say about diversity in the sport is just PR.
I hear players say that the sport needs to appeal to younger players by making it more exciting and changing the dress code because young people don't want to wear bowties. I'd counter that a much bigger thing that young people don't want is to have an established player scream at you when you win a big match. Being around people like him, and a tour full of respected players that enable him is whats aversive, not a waistcoat.
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