IT ENDS with a trophy lift at the sport’s most prestigious venue, accompanied by an emotional BBC snooker montage of thrills and spills and the adulation of the audience packed into the Crucible Theatre, right in the heart of Sheffield city centre.

But it starts in a sports hall on the outskirts of town. A state-of-the-art sports venue at the English Institute of Sport, no less, but as you walk through the leisure centre halls, behind the thick sound-muffling curtains, skirting towards the temporary seating as one of two sets of four tables come into view, it is a far cry from the Crucible.

Referees operate scoreboards with remote controls, multitasking as they tot up the latest break and respot balls, and it costs punters just £12 for an entire day’s snooker.

The start couldn’t be further from the end, and for the players taking part it is the beginning of what they hope will be a gruelling few weeks of non-stop snooker.

The Crucible itself is a marathon event, with its long-form matches and back-to-back sessions running from 10am often to well past 10pm.

Add in those tough, unpredictable qualifiers, and it makes for a test of endurance for the players ranked outside the top 16.

Those inside the top 16 qualify for the Crucible automatically, but as the 2024 World Snooker Championship enters the fabled one-table set-up, only one player from that bracket, Kyren Wilson, remains.

None of the top-10 ranked players made it to the semi-finals. Six of the top 10 were knocked out in the first round, including defending champion Luca Brecel.

Shaun Murphy and one of the pre-tournament favourites Mark Allen fell in the last 16 before the high-profile exits of Judd Trump and Ronnie O’Sullivan followed in the quarters.

It meant that, as the partition was removed and two tables in close quarters became a more roomy, one-table affair, three of the four semi-finalists had come through the qualifiers.

David Gilbert (ranked 31), Stuart Bingham (29) and Jak Jones (44), all joined qualifying at the third round stage, meaning they each had to win two games to reach the Crucible.

Their qualifying matches were fairly low-key affairs, but some of these games attract gatherings of spectators in the rows of seats behind specific tables.

Snooker legend Jimmy White’s second-round match with 20-year-old Liu Hongyu was popular, while there was a decent congregation for 2015 World Champion Bingham for his match with Louis Heathcote.

There are numerous Chinese wonderkids to look out for at this stage of the tournament and their matches draw scatterings of intrigue.

There was some high-quality play in the game involving eventual qualifier Si Jiahui and his opponent Wu Yize, while 18-year-old Jiang Jun impressed despite losing to top-20-ranked Hossein Vafaei of Iran.

The big shock in qualifying was the exit of 2010 champion Neil Robertson, but there is a depth of similar-level players bidding to get to the Crucible and qualifying is not easy.

In many ways, a sports hall is a strange venue for snooker. The snooker set-up itself is contained inside those heavy curtains and World Snooker Tour paraphernalia, but just outside this assembled snooker world, basketball nets protrude from the walls and a balcony overlooks the eight tables as staff and visitors go about their routines.

The boards of the hall floor feel like they make too much noise as you make your way to one of the tables, ushered in by the staff who do their best to make sure spectators don’t disturb the players.

In the lobby, you pass various gym-goers and patrons. Down the next hallway might be Jimmy White or Jack Lisowski, signing autographs and having selfies taken with fans.

It’s a contrast to the old-school glamour of snooker’s favourite and most prestigious venue in the centre of Sheffield.

The Crucible Theatre was once a snooker stage filled with cigarette smoke and tobacco sponsorship, lined with alcoholic drinks varying in quantity depending on the player.

It was a sporting theatre production that in many ways still reflected the snooker clubs in which the tournament had often been played before moving to this venue and those across the country where these players learnt their trade.

It is now more clean-cut but remains a vintage stage.

Bottles of water replaced the beer and betting sponsorship replaced cigarette brands. The tournament’s title sponsor is currently a used car marketplace accompanied by a seemingly obligatory, almost subliminal, Saudi Arabia sponsorship presence.

Only three qualifiers have ever won the World Championship — Alex Higgins (1972), Terry Griffiths (1975) and Shaun Murphy (2005). Only Griffiths and Murphy did so at the Crucible.

Only eight qualifiers have reached Crucible finals, but this year there will be at least one more, as the players have overcome the odds, running the snooker marathon across Sheffield in a bid to be crowned world champion.